Texas Co. v. Gulf Refining Co.
| Decision Date | 05 April 1926 |
| Docket Number | No. 253.,253. |
| Parties | TEXAS CO. v. GULF REFINING CO. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Southern District of Texas |
C. R. Wharton, J. A. McNair, and Brady Cole, all of Houston, Tex., for plaintiff.
D. Edward Greer and John E. Green, Jr., both of Houston, Tex., for defendant.
Borrowing from the plaintiff's brief his martial figure, plaintiff, at first without securing an order of the court, "advanced" to make a breach in the defendant's lines by filing interrogatories to a corporate defendant under equity rule No. 58. This "advance," distinguished alike by the hardihood and lack of discretion often characterizing advances by sappers and mining parties, the defendant repelled by motion to strike, invoking the second paragraph of the rule:
"If any party to the cause is a public or private corporation, any opposite party may apply to the court or judge for an order allowing him to file interrogatories to be answered by any officer of the corporation, and an order may be made accordingly for the examination of such officer as may appear to be proper upon such interrogatories as the court or judge may think fit."
Whereupon plaintiff, calling in his pioneer detachment by asking to withdraw his interrogatories, reformed his lines under cover of an application to the court for an order under the second paragraph, and again advanced, this time with discretion and in good order.
Though, in view of the plaintiff's express withdrawal of what he calls his original bill of discovery, it is not necessary for me to decide whether it was correctly filed, I have concluded to say, for the future guidance of parties in this court, that I think it entirely plain that the original interrogatories were improperly filed, and that the second paragraph of the rule controls and provides the practice for all proceedings under the rule involving corporations as parties. I think it evident that plaintiff, as to part of the relief asked in his motion, has entirely misapprehended the purpose and effect of the rule. On his brief he says: "We wish also to probe the private consciences of the three individual officers of the defendant corporation." If, as appears from plaintiff's use of the terms, an officer of a corporation has two consciences, one corporate and the other private, it ought to go for granted that it is only his corporate conscience which plaintiff can make discovery of under this rule; for it is the corporation, and not the officer, who is a party, and therefore his corporate, and not his private, conscience which may be probed.
But I think this splitting of his conscience into corporate and private has no sanction in either law, metaphysics, or morals, for a corporate officer is still a man in all parts like as we are, who answers when directed to do so by the court on behalf of the...
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