Exxon Corp. v. Chick Kam Choo

• Decision Date: 21 May 1987
• Docket Number: No. 86-2428,86-2428
• Parties: , 55 USLW 2676 EXXON CORPORATION, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. CHICK KAM CHOO, et al., Defendants-Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit

Page 307

817 F.2d 307

1988 A.M.C. 923, 55 USLW 2676

EXXON CORPORATION, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. CHICK KAM CHOO, et al., Defendants-Appellants.

No. 86-2428.

United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

May 21, 1987.

Joseph C. Blanks, Beaumont, Tex., for defendants-appellants.

James Patrick Cooney, Houston, Tex., for plaintiffs-appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

Before CLARK, Chief Judge, GEE, and REAVLEY, Circuit Judges.

GEE, Circuit Judge:

This appeal presents a novel issue: whether the dismissal on forum non conveniens grounds of a maritime action by a federal court precludes litigation of the same claims in a state court located in the same city. We conclude that the forum non conveniens determination in federal court is binding in a subsequent action between the same parties in the nearby state court. ^*

A. Facts and Prior Proceedings

Appellant Choo's husband Leong Chang was a shipwright. In 1977, he was killed in an accident while helping to repair a vessel docked in Singapore. Madam Choo sued the appellees, who are the owner and the operator of the vessel, in the Houston federal court for damages under the Jones Act, DOSHA, general maritime law, and the Texas wrongful death statute. The district court granted summary judgment on the merits of the Jones Act, DOSHA, and general maritime law claims, but granted the appellees only a conditional dismissal of the remaining claims because Houston was an inconvenient forum. ¹ Madam Choo failed to appeal, and the denial of her subsequent Rule 60(b) motion was affirmed in Chick Kam Choo v. Exxon Corp., 699 F.2d 693 (5th Cir.) ("Choo I"), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 826, 104 S.Ct. 98, 78 L.Ed.2d 103 (1983).

Madam Choo brought the same claims in a Texas state court in Houston. ² Exxon removed the case on diversity grounds to the federal district court, which dismissed the case as res judicata and sanctioned Choo's lawyers. On appeal, our Court reversed the removal, holding that there was not complete diversity between the parties. Chick Kam Choo v. Exxon Corp., 764 F.2d 1148 (5th Cir.1985) ("Choo II"). The sanctions were dissolved and the case returned to state court. Exxon then brought this independent action seeking to enjoin the state court proceeding as an interference with the prior judgment of the federal court. The district court granted the injunction and again sanctioned Choo's attorneys. Choo appeals.

B. Jurisdiction and the Anti-Injunction Act

Madam Choo concedes on brief that jurisdiction is proper in this case if the district court was properly enjoining the state litigation as res judicata:

As a general rule, no independent basis of jurisdiction is needed for the court to entertain an application for injunction under the third exception [to the Anti-Injunction Statute, 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2283, which allows injunctions of state court proceedings "to protect or effectuate" the federal courts judgments]. The matter is considered to be ancillary, supported by the jurisdiction the court had when it entered the original judgment. See Southwest Airlines [v. Texas Int'l Airlines, 546 F.2d 84 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 434 U.S. 832, 98 S.Ct. 117, 54 L.Ed.2d 93 (1977) ] at 89-90, wherein the ancillary jurisdiction to support injunctive relief was supported by earlier action in which the district court properly asserted federal question jurisdiction.

Appellant's brief at 10 (emphasis in original). Therefore the only real issue in this case is whether the district court's dismissal of the first action bound all subsequent proceedings in Houston courts.

As we understand the presentation of Madam Choo's lawyers, she advances three intertwined contentions to show that the Texas court is not bound. The first is that the federal district court's original conditional dismissal of her Texas wrongful death claim was a nullity because the court had dismissed all federal claims and therefore lacked pendent jurisdiction over the Texas claim. The second is that a Texas state court may properly redetermine the identical forum non conveniens issue: whether Houston is a convenient forum for trial of this case from Singapore. The third is that Texas law does not recognize the doctrine of forum non conveniens in actions for personal injury or death and hence that the federal court's application of that doctrine is irrelevant to the state court proceeding. These arguments are not explicitly made in the alternative, but we will consider them in that fashion because they are logically disjoined.

C. The Current Status of the Texas Claims

Madam Choo contends that the district court was without power to dismiss her state-law claims. She does not dispute that the district court intended to dismiss the Texas claims on forum non conveniens grounds. In fact, the magistrate's recommendation in the initial round of litigation in the federal court explicitly included the Texas state claims in the recommendation for conditional forum non conveniens dismissal. ³ But because the district court dismissed all her claims under substantive federal law, she argues that the court thereby deprived itself of power to adjudicate her pendent claims, and its attempt to do so was a nullity.

The judgment of the district court sounds inconsistent in this respect. It first dismissed all federal claims, including those under "the general maritime laws of the United States," on the merits. Then, it granted a motion for conditional forum non conveniens dismissal without specifying what claims were being dismissed on that ground. ⁴ As we have noted, the Texas claims were no doubt meant to be included in this conditional dismissal, but the court did not state which, if any, federal claims were conditionally dismissed.

A sufficient but incomplete response to this argument is that even if no federal admiralty claim remained in the case, the district court still retained pendent jurisdiction over the state claims. Dismissal of federal claims on the merits does not deprive a federal court of jurisdiction over state claims. See United Mine Workers v. Gibbs, 383 U.S. 715, 725, 86 S.Ct. 1130, 1138, 16 L.Ed.2d 218 (1966). Furthermore, even supposing the district court to have abused its discretion in dismissing the pendent state claim as forum non conveniens, that ruling was not appealed and thus, right or wrong in the abstract, is binding on the parties as a practical matter. Courts are no longer sympathetic to the argument that judicial blunders void the jurisdiction or nullify the power of a court. See Archie v. Christian, 808 F.2d 1132 (5th Cir.1987) (en banc) (lack of consent to a jury trial before a federal magistrate as required by statute does not undermine the district court's jurisdiction or nullify the judgment so as to warrant sua sponte reversal on appeal).

But we must reject for more fundamental reasons the contention that the district court was without jurisdiction to dispose of the state claims. The federal court sitting in admiralty is a court of plenary jurisdiction. Such a court is not deprived of jurisdiction by reason of the fact that neither federal statutory law nor general maritime law provides the substantive law to resolve the matter before it. The Lauritzen-Romero-Rhoditis ⁵ doctrine applied by the district court is a maritime choice of law doctrine. When an admiralty court determines that foreign law applies, that is simply one factor to be considered in forum non conveniens analysis. It is axiomatic that only a court with jurisdiction over the case can dismiss it as filed in a forum non conveniens.

In this case, the district court granted summary judgment on the claim that the substantive general maritime law of the United States governed the action; but it implicitly acknowledged that the plaintiffs--survivors of a ship repairman killed on an operational vessel in navigable waters--have admiralty tort claims. See Kelly v. Smith, 485 F.2d 520, 523-26 (5th Cir.1973) (setting out test for admiralty jurisdiction), cert. denied sub nom. Chicot Land Co. v. Kelly, 416 U.S. 969, 94 S.Ct. 1991, 40 L.Ed.2d 558 (1974); cf. Cormier v. Oceanic Contractors, Inc., 696 F.2d 1112, 1113 (5th Cir.) (welder injured while working aboard a barge moored for loading in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is a Sieracki seaman ⁶ entitled to bring an unseaworthiness claim under the general maritime law), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 821, 104 S.Ct. 85, 78 L.Ed.2d 94 (1983). The court simply declined to exercise its undoubted admiralty jurisdiction over claims by Singapore plaintiffs on an alleged tort in Singapore to which the substantive law of Singapore should be applied. Therefore, the conditional dismissal included maritime tort claims and the federal court necessarily had jurisdiction to dispose of pendent state claims.

We have established that Madam Choo's claims under Texas law were conditionally dismissed as forum non conveniens in the first round of litigation by a court with power to do so. We now squarely face Choo's alternative argument: A Texas state court may nevertheless redetermine whether forum non conveniens applies to a case previously dismissed on that ground in a federal court a few blocks away. This poses issues both important and novel, to which we now turn.

D. The Effect of the Forum Non Conveniens Dismissal

Federal courts have permitted relitigation of the forum non conveniens issue in a different federal forum when the plaintiff has demonstrated different contacts between the new forum and the underlying dispute. In Mizokami Brothers of Arizona v. Mobay Chemical Corp., 660 F.2d 712, 716 (6th Cir.1981), an Arizona district court had dismissed a dispute between international parties on forum non conveniens grounds. The Sixth Circuit held that the plaintiff could relitigate the forum non conveniens issue in a Missouri district court.

Appellant here has contended that the contacts of the parties with Missouri, the availability of...