Opinion
No. 232.
May 25, 1942.
Appeal from the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.
Action by the Young Realty Company against Darling Stores Corporation. From a judgment of the District Court for the Southern District of New York in the amount of $9,143.67, entered pursuant to an order granting plaintiff's motion for summary judgment, defendant appeals.
Affirmed.
The judgment here appealed from was recovered upon appellee's complaint alleging that it had recovered a judgment against appellant in the District Court for the Southern District of Iowa. Appellant's answer alleged that the Iowa judgment was rendered without jurisdiction over the appellant's person. The Iowa action was brought for breach of a lease with Darling Shops, Inc., the leasehold subsidiary of appellant, and appellant was joined on the theory, sustained by the court, that it so dominated the subsidiary as to make it a mere agent, or adjunct of appellant's business. Darling Shops, Inc., had applied for and received a permit to do business in Iowa, and had thereby rendered itself subject to substituted service upon a named statutory agent or upon the Secretary of State. Such service was made and, although Darling Shops, Inc., had withdrawn from the state prior to the institution of the suit, the adequacy of the service was sustained by the District Court, and, on appeal, by the Circuit Court of Appeals. Darling Stores Corp. v. Young Realty Co., 8 Cir., 121 F.2d 112. It was also there held that service upon the Secretary of State established jurisdiction over the appellant, which had never applied for a permit to do business in Iowa, since it was "under the duty of complying with the provisions of the Iowa statute. Such compliance will be conclusively presumed to justify the service of process made." 121 F.2d at page 116.
Szold Brandwen, of New York City (Irvine J. Shubert and Aaron Levy, both of New York City, of counsel), for plaintiff-appellee.
Stanley M. Dorman, of New York City (Eugene Frederick Roth, of New York City, on the brief), for defendant-appellant.
Before AUGUSTUS N. HAND, CLARK, and FRANK, Circuit Judges.
This action is brought upon a judgment obtained in a federal district court in Iowa, which was affirmed in Darling Stores Corp. v. Young Realty Co., 8 Cir., 121 F.2d 112, certiorari denied October 13, 1942, 314 U.S. 658, 62 S.Ct. 111, 86 L.Ed. ___. There the appellant raised precisely the issue of lack of jurisdiction that it has raised here, but the decision, as indicated, went against it. It asserts here, in effect, that that decision is open to collateral attack because the court drew wrong factual inferences from the findings of fact and incorrectly interpreted the Iowa statute as applied to those inferences. Such alleged errors could not have been successfully asserted in such a suit as this even in those days when judgments were more vulnerable than now. And surely, today, such an error cannot be asserted in the light of recent Supreme Court decisions which have markedly diminished the peculiar sacredness of jurisdictional issues and have accorded greater potency to a court's determination that it has jurisdiction. Baldwin v. Iowa Traveling Men's Ass'n, 283 U.S. 522, 51 S.Ct. 517, 75 L.Ed. 1244; Stoll v. Gottlieb, 305 U.S. 165, 59 S.Ct. 134, 83 L.Ed. 104; Chicot Drainage District v. Baxter State Bank, 308 U.S. 371, 60 S.Ct. 317, 84 L. Ed. 329; Treinies v. Sunshine Mining Co., 308 U.S. 66, 67, 60 S.Ct. 44, 84 L.Ed. 85; Sunshine Coal Co. v. Adkins, 310 U.S. 381, 60 S.Ct. 907, 84 L.Ed. 1263.
The judgment of the district court is affirmed.