First Nat. Bank of Chicago v. United Air Lines, Inc.

342 U.S. 396, 72 S. Ct. 421, 96 L. Ed. 2d 441, 1952 U.S. LEXIS 2382

• Court: Supreme Court of the United States
• Decided: April 7, 1952
• Docket: 349
• Status: Published

Opinions

Mr. Justice Black

delivered the opinion of the Court.

John Louis Nelson was killed when one of respondent’s airliners crashed in Utah. Claiming $200,000 under the Utah wrongful death statute, petitioner brought. this action in a United States district court in Illinois. Decedent prior to his death was a resident and citizen of Illinois; petitioner, his executor, is an Illinois bank; and respondent, United Air Lines, Inc., is a Delaware corporation doing business in Illinois. Since the jurisdictional amount and diversity of citizenship requirements have been met, the case is properly triable under 28 U. S. C. § 1332 unless ch. 70, § 2 of the Illinois Revised Statutes bars the action. This Illinois law provides:

“no action shall be brought or prosecuted in this ■ State to recover damages for a death occurring outside of this State where a right of action for such death exists under the laws of the place where such death occurred and service of process in such suit may be had upon the defendant in such place.”

TKifDistrict Court and Court of Appeals, relying on the doctrine declared in Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U. S. 64, as discussed and applied in later cases,¹ held that in a diversity case such as this the state statute was binding on the federal as well as state courts in Illinois and constituted a bar to maintenance of this action.² In so doing, they rejected two constitutional contentions made by petitioner: (1). Congress having granted diversity jurisdiction to , federal district courts pursuant to power granted by Article III of the Constitution, that jurisdiction cannot be abridged or destroyed by the Illinois statute; (2) the Illinois statute violates the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the United States Constitution (Art. IV, § 1) in providing that claims for Utah deaths shall not be enforcéd in Illinois state courts where service on defendants could be had in Utah. We need not discuss this first constitutional contention or the Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins problems presented by it, for we recently held in Hughes v. Fetter, 341 U. S. 609, that a Wisconsin statute, much like that of Illinois, did violate the Full Faith and Credit Clause. It was to consider this full faith and credit question with reference to the Illinois statute that we granted certiorari. 342 U. S. 875.

The Wisconsin statute invalidated in Hughes v. Fetter, supra, barred suit in the Wisconsin courts for any wrongful death caused outside the state. The Illinois statute before us today is the exact duplicate of the Wisconsin statute with the single exception that suit is permitted in Illinois under another state’á wrongful death statute if service of process cannot be .liad on the defendant in the state where the death was brought about. That Illinois is willing for its courts to try some out-of-state death actions is no reason for its refusal to grant full faith and credit as to others. The reasons supporting our invalidation of Wisconsin’s statute apply with equal force to that of Illinois. This is true although Illinois agrees to try cases- where service cannot be obtained in another state. While we said in Hughes v. Fetter that it was relevant that Wisconsin might be the only state in which service could be had on one of the defendants, we were careful to point out that this fact was not crucial. Nor is it crucial here that Illinois only excludes cases that can be tried in other states. We hold again that the Full Faith and Credit Clause forbids such exclusion. The District Court should not have dismissed, this case.

Reversed.

1 E. g., Angel v. Bullington, 330 U. S. 183; Woods v. Interstate Realty Co., 337 U. S. 535.

2 190 F. 2d 493. The Court of Appeals cited and relied on two of its former holdings, Trust Co. of Chicago v. Pennsylvania R. Co., 183 F. 2d 640, and Munch v. United Air Lines, 184 F. 2d 630.