Davis v. Kansas City, S. & M. R. Co.
| Decision Date | 14 December 1887 |
| Citation | 32 F. 863 |
| Parties | DAVIS v. KANSAS CITY, S. & M.R. CO. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Western District of Tennessee |
W. M Randolph, for plaintiff.
C. H Trimble, (J. M. Greer, with him,) for defendant.
The motion to dismiss for want of jurisdiction is based on the fact that the ad damnum in the writ and declaration is less than $2,000, the amount fixed as the minimum limit of our jurisdiction by the act of March 3, 1887, c. 373, (24 St 552,) the suit having been commenced a few days after that act was passed, evidently in ignorance of the changes made by it. The plaintiff moved to amend the writ and declaration by increasing the ad damnum to $2,500, but this motion the defendant resists, on the ground that it is manifestly made to give the court a fictitious jurisdiction.
By the Revised Statutes, (section 948 and 954,) the power and duty of the courts to allow amendments most liberally has been long established, and no practice is more generous in that regard than that of our federal courts. In one case, the ad damnum was amended, after verdict, to include damages given by the jury, which was larger than the sum claimed by the writ and declaration. Elting v. Campbell, 5 Blatchf, 183. If the factitious circumstances of the passing of this new act of congress a few days before the suit was brought did not exist in this case, no resistance to this motion would be thought of by the defendant; and the position that the plaintiff should show, by affidavit or other proof, that he had reasonable grounds for a larger estimate of his damages than he made when the suit was brought, would not be taken, for it is certain that neither in the state practice nor our own, has that ever been required on a motion to amend the ad damnum in a case where the cause of action was like this. The plaintiff has a right to claim what damages he pleases, either when he institutes his suit, or afterwards by amendment, and I cannot think that this adventitious circumstance of a change in the amount of our jurisdiction can at all influence that right. There is a strong suspicion, no doubt, that he wishes to make the change to meet the requirements of the new act of congress; and that may be the fact: yet we do not know that it is a fact, and in the very nature of the case it may be that his damages are really larger than $2,000, instead of being only $1,500, as he at first laid them in his writ. We cannot judicially know that he is acting fraudulently to give us jurisdiction, rather than that he is acting honestly to correct a former error of judgment, and this is what the contention against the motion means.
Indeed where our jurisdiction depends on the amount in dispute, and the cause of action is one in which, from its nature, the plaintiff is at liberty to lay what damages he pleases, as in libel, slander, or other injuries to person or property, I am not prepared to say that he may not deliberately overestimate them in order to give a particular court jurisdiction. It has been held that one may deliberately move into another state, and acquire a diverse citizenship, in order to give the United States courts jurisdiction of his cause of action; and I have heard, when at the bar, one eminent circuit judge, now deceased, say from the bench that such conduct might be 'an exhibition of both good taste and good judgment' by the party to a suit. And so it might be, if the party's conduct...
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