Joseph Muller Corp. Zurich v. SOCIETE ANONYME DE GER., ET D'ARMEMENT, 69 Civ. 4222
| Decision Date | 23 June 1970 |
| Docket Number | No. 69 Civ. 4222,4223.,69 Civ. 4222 |
| Citation | 314 F. Supp. 439 |
| Parties | JOSEPH MULLER CORPORATION ZURICH, Plaintiff, v. SOCIETE ANONYME DE GERANCE ET D'ARMEMENT and Petromar Societe Anonyme, Defendants. JOSEPH MULLER CORPORATION ZURICH, Plaintiff, v. SOCIETE ANONYME DE GERANCE ET D'ARMEMENT, Petromar Societe Anonyme, Mundo Gas, S.A., Gazocean International, S.A., Gazocean France, Gazocean, U.S.A., et al., Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Southern District of New York |
Raphael, Searles & Vischi, New York City, for plaintiff; Benjamin Gassman, New York City, of counsel.
Haight, Gardner, Poor & Havens, New York City, for defendant Societe Anonyme De Gerance Et D'Armement; John C. Moore, and C. Raymond Nelson, New York City, of counsel.
Defendant Societe Anonyme De Gerance Et D'Armement moves, pursuant to Rule 12(b), Fed.R.Civ.P., to dismiss the complaints in two separate but related actions. Alternatively, defendant moves to stay the first action pending arbitration.
Plaintiff is a corporation organized under the laws of Switzerland with its principal place of business in Zurich. The moving defendant is a corporation organized under the laws of France with its principal place of business in Paris.
In the first of the two actions, plaintiff claims defendant breached a written charter party agreement with plaintiff to transport by ship a chemical product, vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) from the United States to Europe. Plaintiff also claims that it exercised an irrevocable option which had been granted by defendant to extend the charter party agreement under the same terms and conditions as the original contract and that defendant breached this agreement by refusing to transport and deliver additional VCM.
In the second action, plaintiff claims defendant violated the federal antitrust statutes by monopolizing the transportation of VCM and conspiring to fix transportation charges.
Defendant's motions to dismiss the complaints in both actions on the ground of lack of subject matter jurisdiction can conveniently be considered together, since they raise the same question: plaintiff's legal capacity to sue defendant in the United States. Defendant contends that the Swiss laws under which plaintiff was organized prohibit plaintiff from suing defendant anywhere except in France.
Specifically, defendant relies on a Convention on Jurisdiction and Enforcement of Judgments in Civil Matters entered into by France and Switzerland in 1869. This treaty provides in substance that in all disputes of a civil or commercial nature between French and Swiss nationals, the plaintiff is required to institute the action in the courts of the nation of the defendant.
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure provide that "the capacity of a corporation to sue or be sued in a federal court shall be determined by the law under which it was organized." Fed.R. Civ.P. rule 17(b).
At first glance, Rule 17 would appear to allow the state or nation under whose laws a corporation is organized to grant the corporation the capacity to sue and immunize it from being sued anywhere except in the state or nation of incorporation. "Capacity to sue or be sued," however, as used in the Rule was, in order to obviate this problem of creating immunity, intended to mean the general capacity to sue or be sued. The laws under which a corporation is organized either grant or withhold the capacity to sue or be sued, and the Federal Rules look to the laws under which a corporation is organized to determine if a corporation has been granted this general capacity.
Once it is determined that a corporation has the general capacity "to...
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...have capacity to be sued in the particular state in which the federal court is sitting. Joseph Muller Corp. Zurich v. Societe Anonyme de Gerance et D'Armement, 314 F.Supp. 439, 441 (S.D.N.Y.1970), aff'd in part, rev'd in part on other grounds, 451 F.2d 727 (2d Cir. 1971), cert. denied, 406 ......
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Joseph Muller Corp. Zurich v. Societe Anonyme De Gerance et d'armement
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