Vaughan v. Southern Ry. Co.

• Decision Date: 07 October 1976
• Docket Number: No. 75-2107,75-2107
• Citation: 542 F.2d 641
• Parties: Charles J. VAUGHAN, Ancillary Administrator of the Estate of Eldon Eure Swain, Appellant, v. SOUTHERN RAILWAY COMPANY, Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

Page 641

542 F.2d 641

Charles J. VAUGHAN, Ancillary Administrator of the Estate of Eldon Eure Swain, Appellant, v. SOUTHERN RAILWAY COMPANY, Appellee.

No. 75-2107.

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued April 1, 1976.

Decided Oct. 7, 1976.

Morton Whitlow, Portsmouth, Va. (Richard S. Young, Mattox, Sondej & Young, Portsmouth, Va., Charles J. Vaughan, Turner & Vaughan, Woodland, N.C., on brief), for appellant.

J. Kenyon Wilson, Elizabeth City, N.C. (Philip P. Godwin, Gateville, N.C., and W. T. Joyner, Jr., Raleigh, N.C., on brief), for appellee.

Before HAYNSWORTH, Chief Judge, and WINTER and BUTZNER, Circuit Judges.

HAYNSWORTH, Chief Judge:

In 1969 this court was presented with the first of a series of cases dealing with the appointment of a fiduciary to create or defeat diversity jurisdiction. Lester v. McFaddon, 4th Cir., 415 F.2d 1101 held that the appointment of a Georgia resident as administrator of the estate of a South Carolina decedent for the purpose of bringing a wrongful death action in the federal courts against a South Carolina defendant was an "improper manufacture of jurisdiction." Id. at 1104. Subsequent cases reaffirmed and expanded the Lester notion that the citizenship of the personal representative is not an inflexible determinant of diversity of citizenship. Miller v. Perry, 4th Cir., 456 F.2d 63; Bishop v. Hendricks, 4th Cir., 495 F.2d 289. See generally, 6 Wright and Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 1557 (1971). Now, a related question has arisen in a new context.

In 1972, Eldon Swain, a resident of Portsmouth, Virginia, was killed in North Carolina when, seated between the rails, he was hit by a Southern Railway train. Southern is incorporated in Virginia and has its principal place of business in the District of Columbia. The decedent's mother, Marie Swain, who was also a citizen of Virginia, qualified as administratrix of the Swain estate for the purpose of bringing suit against Southern Railway for wrongful death. There were no assets in the Swain estate other than the wrongful death claim.

According to the plaintiff, it was determined that the most convenient place for trial would be the State of North Carolina. The action would be governed by North Carolina law since the accident occurred there, and all of the potential witnesses resided in North Carolina. Since North Carolina law requires that a resident ancillary administrator be appointed to bring such an action, ¹ the plaintiff, Vaughan, a North Carolina attorney, was appointed ancillary administrator of the Swain estate. Vaughan brought the wrongful death action in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Nominally, the action is between parties who are of diverse citizenship, a situation which would not have existed had the action been filed by Marie Swain, the mother and beneficiary.

The defendant filed a motion to dismiss on the ground that Vaughan had not properly qualified as administrator. The district court, relying on Lester and Miller, ruled that whether Vaughan had properly qualified, the case should be dismissed because Vaughan's appointment was made for the purpose of transferring an essentially local controversy into the federal courts. For the reasons stated below, we agree that dismissal was proper.

In Lester, we relied upon Kramer v. Caribbean Mills, 394 U.S. 823, 89 S.Ct. 1487, 23 L.Ed.2d 9 and McSparran v. Weist, 3d Cir., 402 F.2d 867 to conclude that a federal court may ignore the citizenship of a personal representative and look to that of the beneficiaries he represents if it is determined that the joinder of the personal representative was improper or collusive to invoke the court's jurisdiction within the meaning of 28 U.S.C.A. § 1359. ² We focused on the fact that there were no other assets in the estate and concluded that as was true of the assignee in Kramer, the foreign administrator had done little more than lend the use of his name and could best be termed a "straw party." 415 F.2d at 1103-04.

Miller presented the converse of Lester. In Miller, a Florida resident was killed in North Carolina and his administrator, also a citizen of Florida, sought to bring a wrongful death action in the federal courts of North Carolina. He was thwarted in his efforts, however, by the same North Carolina rule involved in this case, the requirement that a North Carolina administrator be appointed to bring an action for wrongful death in that state. Accordingly, a North Carolina administrator was appointed, and the district court subsequently dismissed the action because the defendant was also a North Carolinian.

On appeal, we reversed the district court and held that the citizenship of a resident administrator reluctantly procured by out-of-state beneficiaries for the sole purpose of complying with a state procedural requirement should not be looked to when to do so would defeat diversity jurisdiction. In so holding, we implicitly decided that the rule announced by the Supreme Court in Mecom v. Fitzsimmons Drilling Co., 284 U.S. 183, 52 S.Ct. 84, 76 L.Ed. 233 (1931) is not "inflexible and constitutionally mandated." 456 F.2d at 64.

The final case in the Fourth Circuit trilogy, Bishop v. Hendricks, was a Lester situation. This court, noting that Miller had signaled "a substantial change in diversity jurisdiction," held that the appointment of the foreign administrator was improper or collusive under § 1359. We declared that, motive notwithstanding, the proper test for determining whether an administrator's appointment falls within § 1359 was whether the administrator has "something more than a nominal interest at stake in the litigation." 495 F.2d at 297.

Applying the above principles, we must conclude that Vaughan's citizenship should be disregarded in determining whether diversity of citizenship exists. Since the beneficiaries of the wrongful death claim are all citizens of Virginia, which is also the state of incorporation of the defendant, there is no diversity in this case and the district court was correct in dismissing it for lack of jurisdiction.

The plaintiff earnestly contends that Mecom is dispositive of the present question because it sets forth the "inflexibl(e) criteri(a) for ultimate determination of diversity." Mecom, however, dealt with a case in which the administrator had been selected because his citizenship was not diverse. The effort was not collusively to create federal jurisdiction, but to defeat it. Section 1359 had no relevance in Mecom, as it does here. Here, we cannot say as easily as we did in Lester and Bishop that the appointment of the administrator was collusive and procured solely for the purpose of creating federal diversity jurisdiction, for there was good reason to bring the action in North Carolina, and the North Carolina statutes require that it be brought in the name of a North Carolina administrator. As in Miller v. Perry, if Mrs. Swain was going to bring the action in North Carolina, she was compelled to procure the appointment of a North Carolina administrator. Those circumstances make the purity of her motive beyond question, but she attempts, by the appointment of the North Carolina administrator, to convert this controversy between citizens of Virginia into one between citizens of different states. In Lester we recognize that a finding that an apparent diversity of citizenship was pretensive was not dependent upon evil or reprehensible conduct or motive, but flowed from the fact that the chosen administrator had no stake in the controversy and was selected for the purpose of creating apparent diversity of citizenship. Here, Vaughan has no stake in the outcome of the controversy; given the decision to file the action in North Carolina, his appointment was not solely for the purpose of creating diversity of citizenship, but the attempt to put it to that use may be regarded as a substantial equivalent. With no stake in the outcome of the controversy, substantive diversity of citizenship is as artificial and shadowy as it was in Lester and in Bishop. In that sense, it is pretense, not reality. Indeed, in Bishop we said that the administrator's lack of a stake in the controversy was enough to make his citizenship irrelevant.

Moreover, in Miller v. Perry, where we were unaided by § 1359 for the plaintiff there sought to invoke federal jurisdiction, not to defeat it, we concluded that Mecom had been so eroded by Kramer v. Caribbean Mills that it could no longer be regarded as a rule of universality. We felt free to look to the substantive relations of the parties and concluded that, in determining the existence of diversity of citizenship, on the plaintiff's side we should look to the citizenship of the beneficiaries and not to the citizenship of the representative. Section 1359 at least expresses a greater congressional concern about artificial creation of diversity jurisdiction than about its artificial defeat. Hence, we conclude here, as in Miller, that we should look to the citizenship of the beneficiary in Virginia rather than that of the North Carolina administrator appointed to comply with North Carolina's procedural requirement.

As we observed in Lester, North Carolina's decree appointing Vaughan as administrator "is not under attack. The appointment may be assumed to be valid in every respect and the administrator perfectly free to pursue the action in the state court." ³ The plaintiff could have proceeded in a state court with no difficulty. The action foundered because of the attempt to convert an intra-state controversy into an inter-state controversy.

We are informed that the statute of limitations has run and that an affirmance of the district court's order will mean that the wrongful death claim will never be brought to trial. In an attempt to avoid such hardship, we held in Lester that its rule would be applied prospectively only. This action, however, was filed much later. Now...