Dragan v. Miller
| Decision Date | 04 June 1982 |
| Docket Number | No. 81-1903,81-1903 |
| Citation | 679 F.2d 712 |
| Parties | Nicolae DRAGAN, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. John and Sylvia MILLER, Defendants-Appellees. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
John R. Vintilla, Cleveland, Ohio, for plaintiffs-appellants.
Luke R. Morin, Dixon, Ill., for defendants-appellees.
Before WOOD, ESCHBACH and POSNER, Circuit Judges.
The complaint in this diversity case, filed in September 1980, alleges that the plaintiffs are residents of Rumania and the nieces and nephews-and heirs by intestacy-of Walter Dragan; that Dragan died in Illinois in June 1979 at the age of 87, leaving a will that bequeathed his entire property to the defendants; and that the defendants, who are not related to Dragan, had improperly influenced him when he was "ill and enfeebled" to will his property away from the plaintiffs. The complaint asks that the defendants be declared constructive trustees of Dragan's estate for the plaintiffs' benefit. The district court dismissed the complaint on the ground that it was within the probate exception to federal diversity jurisdiction.
The probate exception is one of the most mysterious and esoteric branches of the law of federal jurisdiction. The usual account given of it is historical. The Judiciary Act of 1789, ch. 20, § 11, 1 Stat. 78, conferred on the federal courts, in diversity cases, concurrent jurisdiction over "all suits of a civil nature at common law or in equity." The counterpart language in the current grant of diversity jurisdiction to the federal courts, "all civil actions," 28 U.S.C. § 1332(a), may seem broader, but it was intended to be synonymous with the language quoted above from the Judiciary Act of 1789. See Reviser's Note to 28 U.S.C. § 1332 (1976). Now "suits of a civil nature at common law or in equity" meant in eighteenth-century England suits brought in either the common law courts or the chancery court; and it is argued that since the probate of wills and the administration of intestate estates were within the exclusive jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical court, they were not included in the Judiciary Act's grant of jurisdiction to the federal courts. See, e.g., Markham v. Allen, 326 U.S. 490, 494, 66 S.Ct. 296, 298, 90 L.Ed. 256 (1946). One does not have to be an expert historian to spot the flaws in this reasoning. First, there was no ecclesiastical court in America, and it is not obvious why the language of the Judiciary Act of 1789 should be taken to refer exclusively to English rather than American courts. Someone should investigate the jurisdiction of American equity courts in the eighteenth century relative to that of any specialized probate courts that might have corresponded to the ecclesiastical court in England; no one has. Second, the scope of the exclusive jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical court is very uncertain. In particular, it appears not to have extended beyond personal property; apparently the court of chancery had extensive jurisdiction over the inheritance of land. See, e.g., Barnesly v. Powel, 1 Ves.Sen. 284, 286-87, 27 Eng.Rep. 1034, 1036 (Ch. 1749). The complaint in this case alleges that Dragan's estate included a valuable piece of land.
But however shoddy the historical underpinnings of the probate exception, it is too well established a feature of our federal system to be lightly discarded, and by an inferior court at that, even if we were to reject as artificial the proposition that Congress's failure to repeal the exception when reenacting from time to time the grant of diversity jurisdiction to the federal courts indicates congressional acquiescence. So we accept, as settled law that we have no wish to disturb no matter how dubious its historical pedigree, the statement of the Supreme Court in the Markham case that "a federal court has no jurisdiction to probate a will or administer an estate ...." 326 U.S. at 494, 66 S.Ct. at 298. But this is not what the court below was asked to do. Dragan's will was admitted to probate in an Illinois court; the court directed the distribution of his estate in accordance with the terms of the will; the estate was distributed to the people who are the defendants in this action; and with that the probate proceeding ended. The plaintiffs do not want to enjoin or reopen that probate proceeding or reach property in the hands of the state court. There is no such property. The defendants have it, and the plaintiffs want to get it out of their hands. So not only does this lawsuit not ask the federal court to probate a will or administer an estate, but it does not seek to "interfere with the probate proceedings or assume general jurisdiction of the probate or control of the property in the custody of the state court." Markham, supra, 326 U.S. at 494, 66 S.Ct. at 298. In Markham, the Alien Property Custodian had succeeded to the interests of German nationals to whom the decedent had willed his property, but a state court had disregarded the will and given the decedent's property to his heirs on the basis of a California statute that forbade the devise of property to certain aliens. The Alien Property Custodian brought suit against the heirs to recover the decedent's property on the ground that the will was valid notwithstanding the California statute. The Supreme Court held that the federal district court had jurisdiction over the suit. Superficially, at least, the present case is similar.
But before we conclude that Markham controls we ought to consider the purposes that the probate exception to federal diversity jurisdiction might be thought to serve. Even if the framers of the Judiciary Act of 1789 intended to deny to the federal courts jurisdiction over the sorts of cases that in England were heard in the ecclesiastical court, they presumably had some reason for doing this besides the name of the court. And the exception probably would not have persisted as long as it has without a better reason than that it may have been implicit in the first judiciary act or that the framers of Article III of the Constitution may have intended to limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts to the types of cases adjudicated in the English common law and chancery courts. Rigidly historicist interpretations of the Constitution have not been much in vogue for generations.
Several practical reasons for the probate exception, of varying weight, occur to us. One is the promotion of legal certainty. If an issue may end up being litigated in either a state or a federal court, its resolution is less certain, less predictable, than if it can be litigated in one or the other forum only, even if the same substantive law is applied. Certainty is desirable in every area of the law but has been thought especially so with regard to the transfer of property at death. See, e.g., Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws, § 11, comment c (1971). There are obstacles enough to effectuating testamentary intentions; legal uncertainty ought not to be one of them. This is an argument for exclusive state jurisdiction, since the federal courts cannot exercise jurisdiction in relation to decedents' estates except in diversity cases. But it does not strike us as a very powerful argument. If there is diversity of citizenship among the claimants to an estate, the possible bias that a state court might have in favor of citizens of its own state might frustrate the decedent's intentions; it is just such bias, of course, that the diversity jurisdiction of the federal courts was intended to counteract. It is worth noting that the plaintiffs in this case are nonresidents, and the defendants residents, of Illinois, where this case would have been tried had the plaintiffs not invoked federal jurisdiction.
A more compelling reason for the probate exception is judicial economy. When a person dies, his will has to be admitted to probate somewhere, or if he dies intestate the control of his property has to be vested in some court initially, and it is hard to imagine in either case how the initial jurisdiction over the decedent's estate could be elsewhere than in a state court. Only as the probate proceeding unfolds will the prerequisites of diversity jurisdiction-the diverse citizenship of the contestants and the minimum required amount in controversy-appear. If the probate proceeding thus must begin in state court, the interest in judicial economy argues for keeping it there until it is concluded. But this begs the question, when is the probate proceeding concluded? The practical answer, which we elaborate below, is, when there is no longer any substantial judicial diseconomy from conducting further litigation relating to the decedent's estate in a different court from the one where the will was admitted to probate or the intestate estate administered.
If for the above reasons, especially the second (judicial economy), the state courts are going to have a measure of exclusive jurisdiction in probate matters, federal courts will not have much experience in adjudicating certain issues-those characteristic of though not necessarily limited to probate proceedings, in particular issues of testamentary capacity. If so, there is an argument-call it the argument from relative expertness-for confining the adjudication of probate-type issues to state court even when they arise in proceedings that otherwise might not be clearly classifiable as probate proceedings. But this argument like the first seems something of a make-weight. With the explosion in recent years of "will substitutes" such as life insurance and joint savings accounts, the federal courts in diversity cases presumably have acquired at least modest experience with issues of...
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