Hall v. Stern
| Decision Date | 10 July 1884 |
| Citation | 20 F. 788 |
| Parties | HALL and others v. STERN and others. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Southern District of New York |
Edmund Wetmore, for complainants.
Delos McCurdy, for defendants.
The proofs in this accounting do not show that the complainants lost the sale of their patented mirrors to the extent that similar mirrors were sold by the defendants. Both parties were merchants in the city of New York. The complainants sold the mirrors mainly to retailers in that city. The defendants were retailers of general fancy goods. Up to the time when the defendants began to import mirrors and compete in the retail trade with complainants' customers, they had bought exclusively of the complainants, and their purchases were from $1,000 to $1,200 annually. They imported similar mirrors at a cost much below the price the complainants had charged for them, and sold them at greatly reduced prices to their customers, and sold three times as many as they had formerly sold during the same period of time. They made no profits on these sales, but sold at a loss. The proofs show that complainants would have had a monopoly of the sale of the mirrors in the United States during the period covered by the accounting if they had not been interfered with by the defendants; and that the defendants, by their conduct in importing similar mirrors and selling them at retail at a reduced price in the same market, prevented sales which complainants would otherwise have made to other retailers. The damages to which complainants are entitled is the loss which they sustained by the diversion of trade which they would have enjoyed if the defendants had not supplanted them in the market, and their consequent loss of profit on such trade. The master has awarded them damages on the theory that they lost the sale of all the mirrors imported and sold by the defendants during the period in question. The proofs do not justify this conclusion.
The question is not what speculatively the complainants may have lost, but what they actually did lose. If the defendants had not sold the patented mirrors to their customers, it does not follow that the complainants would have sold them to the same customers or to retail merchants. Seymour v McCormick, 16 How. 480. If it had been shown that the ordinary sales of the complainants for the same market fell off during the period of the defendants' sales in an amount equal to, or even approximating reasonably to, the amount of the defendant's sales, the master's findings could be approved. Hostetter v. Vowinkle, 1 Dill. 329. But the proofs do not furnish satisfactory data from which to estimate the extent of the diversion of ...
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