Esper v. Manhattan Transit Co., Inc., 413.

Decision Date16 January 1934
Docket NumberNo. 413.,413.
PartiesESPER v. MANHATTAN TRANSIT CO., Inc.
CourtNew Jersey Supreme Court
169 A. 823

ESPER
v.
MANHATTAN TRANSIT CO., Inc.

No. 413.

Supreme Court of New Jersey.

Jan. 16, 1934.


Appeal from District Court of Passaic.

Action by William J. Esper against the Manhattan Transit Company. From a judgment in favor of plaintiff, defendant appeals.

Reversed.

Argued October term, 1933, before LLOYD, J.

Maurice J. McKeown, of Newark (Robert G. Howell, of Newark, on the brief), for appellant.

Louis Santorf, of Paterson (Joseph D. Donate, of Paterson, on the brief), for respondent.

LLOYD, Justice.

Esper brought an action against the transit company to recover damages for personal injuries and also for damage to his automobile. At the trial the property damage claim was withdrawn and the case proceeded to judgment in favor of the plaintiff for the damages for the personal injuries. From this judgment the defendant appeals.

The ground urged for reversal is that in the progress of the trial it developed that the defendant (appellant here) had instituted an action in another court to recover for injuries to his automobile growing out of the same collision upon which the present suit was predicated. That suit proceeded to judgment against the present plaintiff resting on the averment in the complaint that respondent was guilty of negligence in the operation of his car. While the record of the earlier cases was informally before the district court in the present case, no point is made of this feature, and the respondent conceded at the argument that if the earlier case was properly dispositive of the one now before us no irregularity in its presentation would be claimed. The case was argued orally and is presented in adequate briefs on the appeal.

There is perhaps no rule of law of greater importance than that of res adjudicata. There must come a time when litigation is at an end, and this doctrine came into being for the purpose of determining when this result

169 A. 824

should be reached, and what it should be. The doctrine has been proclaimed in the jurisprudence of all civilized nations (Freeman on Judgments, vol. 2, p. 1321), found its most distinctive recognition in England in 1776 in the Duchess of Kingston's Case (Smith's Leading Cases, vol. 3, p. 1998), has found general acceptance in the states of the Union, and in this state as defined and applied in Re Walsh's Estate, 80 N. J. Eq. 569, 74 A. 563, 565. In the latter case it was declared by the Court of Errors and Appeals to be the law that the "judgment of a court of competent...

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