Power Manufacturing Company v. Saunders
| Decision Date | 02 November 1925 |
| Docket Number | 206 |
| Citation | 276 S.W. 599,169 Ark. 748 |
| Parties | POWER MANUFACTURING COMPANY v. SAUNDERS |
| Court | Arkansas Supreme Court |
Appeal from Saline Circuit Court; Thomas E. Toler, Judge; affirmed.
Judgment affirmed.
Geo C. Lewis and Buzbee, Pugh & Harrison, for appellant.
W R. Donham, for appellee.
Appellee, who was the plaintiff below, was, at the time of the institution of this suit, a resident and citizen of Cincinnati, Ohio, and appellant, the defendant below, is a corporation organized under the laws of that State and having its principal place of business in Marion, Ohio.
Appellant has been duly authorized to do business in this State, and operates at Stuttgart, in Arkansas County, Arkansas, a warehouse, from which it delivers machinery to the purchasers thereof. On March 27, 1922, plaintiff was employed by the defendant at its warehouse in Stuttgart, in conjunction with two other employees of defendant, in rolling a heavy fly-wheel, weighing about four thousand pounds, and about six feet in diameter, on the floor of the warehouse for the purpose of loading the wheel into a railroad car, to be shipped to a party who had purchased the wheel, and, while so engaged, the wheel became overbalanced and fell on plaintiff, and inflicted a very serious injury. This suit was brought to recover damages to compensate this injury.
Defendant moved the court to quash the service of summons and to dismiss the complaint for the want of jurisdiction, for the reason that the plaintiff, at the time of the accident, was a resident and citizen of Arkansas County, where the injury occurred, and where the defendant conducted its business in this State. Defendant did not maintain an office or conduct business in any other county in this State. The suit was brought in Saline County, Arkansas, and it was alleged, in the motion to dismiss, that neither of the parties to this suit, nor any of the witnesses in the case, resided in Saline County, and that it would involve the expenditure of a large sum of money for the defendant to arrange for the attendance of its witnesses in that county. It was therefore alleged in the motion to dismiss that it would be a discrimination against the defendant to require it to defend the suit in Saline County, and that § 1829, C. & M. Digest of the statutes of the State, which permitted the suit to be brought in any county in the State, violated that part of article 12, § 11, of the Constitution of the State, which provides that foreign corporations shall be subject, as to contracts made or business done in this State, to the same regulations, limitations, and liabilities as like corporations of this State, and that said section of the statutes of the State impaired the obligation of the contract created by the Constitution of the State, and is therefore void under § 10, article 1, of the Federal Constitution, and it was further insisted that the statute is in violation of the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, prohibiting a State from depriving any person within the State of his or its property without due process of law, or denying to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.
The motion to quash the summons and to dismiss the action for want of jurisdiction was overruled, and this ruling of the court is assigned as error.
Appellant concedes that the motion to dismiss was properly overruled if § 1829, C. & M. Digest, is valid and constitutional, but, as was set forth in the motion, the constitutionality of that statute is challenged as violative of both the State and Federal Constitutions. The section of the statute in question reads as follows:
The question presented is an interesting one, but was decided adversely to appellant's contention in the case of Pekin Cooperage Co. v. Duty, 140 Ark. 135, 215 S.W. 715. The points here raised were there presented, and we there said that the statute provided a method of procedure whereby foreign corporations which had complied with the laws of the State authorizing them to do business in the State might be sued, and that a local or county residence had not been given such corporations, and that the statute did not impair any constitutional rights of foreign corporations or discriminate against them, but had only provided the forum in which they might be sued, as they had been given no local residence in the State.
It is earnestly insisted, however, that this case should be reconsidered and overruled, in view of the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Kentucky Finance Corporation v. Paramount Auto Exchange Corporation, 262 U.S. 544, 67 L.Ed. 1112, 43 S.Ct. 636. In that case there was involved the validity of a statute of the State of Wisconsin, which provided that a foreign corporation not domesticated or doing business in that State or having property there other than that sought to be recovered in the particular action may be compelled, as a condition to the maintenance of its action, to send an officer of the corporation, with its books and papers bearing on the matter in controversy, from its domicile to the State of Wisconsin, where the action was brought, in order to submit to an adversary examination before the party sued should be required to answer. The statute did not subject nonresident individuals to such examination except when served with notice within the State, and then only in the county where service was had, and limited the examination, in the case of residents of the State, individual or corporate, to the county of their residence.
The statute was upheld by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin (171 Wis. 586), on the ground that it amounted to no more than a reasonable exercise of the authority of the State over a nonresident corporation coming voluntarily into the State to seek a remedy in the courts of that State against a resident defendant.
The case was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States where the view of the Supreme Court of the State of Wisconsin was disapproved, and Mr. Justice Vandevanter, speaking for the Supreme Court of the United States, said the statute violated the equal protection clause of the Federal Constitution by imposing a rule more onerous on foreign corporations than was...
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