Hart Steel Company v. Railroad Supply Company
| Decision Date | 21 May 1917 |
| Docket Number | No. 67,67 |
| Citation | 244 U.S. 294,37 S.Ct. 506,61 L.Ed. 1148 |
| Parties | HART STEEL COMPANY and Guilford S. Wood, Petitioners, v. RAILROAD SUPPLY COMPANY |
| Court | U.S. Supreme Court |
Messrs. Frederick P. Fish, Frank F. Peed, and Edward S. Rogers, for petitioners.
Messrs. Taylor E. Brown and Clarence E. Mehlhope for respondent.
This suit is here on certiorari to review the decision of the circuit court of appeals for the seventh circuit.
On December 9, 1908, the respondent herein, the Railroad Supply Company, as owner of three United States patents, viz., Nos. 538,809, 691,332, and 721,644, filed a bill in the district court for the northern district of Illinois against the Hart Steel Company and Guilford S. Wood, praying that the defendants be restrained from infringing certain designated claims of its patents, which are described in their specifications as covering new and useful improvements in railway tie plates. This case will be hereinafter referred to as the First Case.
Three months later, on March 26, 1909, the same plaintiff commenced a second suit against the Elyria Iron & Steel Company in the district court for the northern district of Ohio, praying for the same relief with respect to the same claim of the same patents as in the First Case.
The two bills differed only as to the parties defendant. The Elyria Iron & Steel Company, the defendant in the Second Case, was a manufacturing corporation and was the owner of all of the capital stock of the Hart Steel Company, the defendant in the First Case, which was the selling agent of the Elyria Company, and Wood was its manager.
The same defenses being relied upon in the two cases, the evidence was taken in the first one, and by stipulation a carbon copy of it was filed in the second, and the same exhibits were used in the two.
The claimed infringement consisted in the manufacture of a single order of tie plates by the Elyria Company and the sale of them by the Hart Company, with Wood as its manager, to the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railroad Company.
Such proceedings were had in the First Case that on December 18, 1911, the circuit court for the northern district of Illinois decided that the construction or device sold by the defendants did not infringe the claims of the plaintiff's patents relied upon, and dismissed the bill for want of equity.
In the Second Case such proceedings were had that on March 4, 1912, the district court for the northern district of Ohio entered precisely the same decree as was entered in the First Case.
Each case was appealed to the appropriate circuit court of appeals and on April 7, 1914, that court for the sixth circuit, in a carefully considered opinion, found the claims of the patents relied upon void for want of novelty and invention, and affirmed the decision of the district court. A petition for rehearing was denied on the 30th day of the following June.
On the 6th day of October, 1914, the first day of the next ensuing term of the circuit court of appeals for the seventh circuit, the defendants in the first suit, which was still pending undetermined, filed a motion praying that court to affirm the decree of the circuit court, upon the ground that all of the issues in the case had been fully and finally determined and adjudicated by the circuit court of appeals of the sixth circuit in the Second Case between the plaintiff and the Elyria Iron & Steel Company, with which the moving defendants, the Hart Steel Company and Guilford S. Wood, were in privity. In support of this motion a copy of the record and journal entries in the Second Case was filed, which showed that the two records were 'identical.'
The record shows that this motion to affirm the decree of the circuit court was argued orally on October 6, 1914, and was on the same day denied, but no reason appears in the record for such denial.
Subsequently the case was argued on its merits and on January 5th, 1915, the circuit court of appeals for the seventh circuit found the plaintiff's patents valid and infringed, and, reversing the decision of the circuit court (then the district court), remanded the case with an order for an accounting.
The Hart Steel Company and Wood, as petitioners in this court, assign as error the overruling by the circuit court of appeals of the seventh circuit of their motion to affirm the decision of the circuit court in their favor.
It is apparent from the foregoing statement that the question presented to the circuit court of appeals of the seventh circuit by the petitioners' motion to affirm was whether or not the decree of the circuit court of appeals of the sixth circuit was a final...
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