Louisville, Cincinnati, & Charleston Rail-Road v. Letson

Status

57 later cases cite Louisville, Cincinnati, & Charleston Rail-Road v. Letson; 57 of those citations sat close to treatment language and were flagged for reading, and all of them have been read. Citations that did not sit near treatment language were not flagged and were not read one by one, so a court that weakened this case without using any of that language would not appear here.

Treatments

Criticized

• A district court called corporate diversity jurisdiction based on a corporation's state of incorporation unrealistic and urged Congress to revise the rule, citing Letson as part of its history.

  United States v. Mayor and Council of City of Hoboken, NJ · District of New Jersey · filed August 10, 1928

  The unreality of taking a ease away from the state court, on the theory that the court and jury are prejudiced, because they are not citizens of the same state as a corporation which happens to have been incorporated in another state, carries its own condemnation of the existing procedure. ... The various positions taken by the United States Supreme Court on this subject are both historical and familiar. See cases cited in the notes to 28 USCA, § 71, and a discussion of the eases of Bank of the United States v. Deveaux, 5 Cranch, 61, 3 L. Ed. 38 (1809), and Louisville, etc., R. R. v. Letson, 2 How. 497, 11 L. Ed. 353 (1844), in Mr. Warren’s History of the Supreme Court, vol. 1, p. 389; vol. 2, p. 394; vol. 3, p. 427. Mr. Warren, in an article in 37 Harv. L. Rev. entitled “History of the Federal Judiciary Act of 1789,” at page 90, refers to the last-named case as “this malignant decision.” ... It seems to this court that the whole question of the diversity of citizenship jurisdiction might profitably be re-examined arid revised to accord with facts rather than with history.

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Limited

• The Supreme Court refused to extend Letson's corporate citizenship rule to make a Missouri corporation an Arkansas citizen merely because Arkansas authorized it to operate there.

  St. Louis & San Francisco Railway Co. v. James · Supreme Court of the United States · filed March 2, 1896

  In Louisville, Cincinnati &c. Railroad v. Letson, 2 How. 497, 555, ... We are now asked to extend the doctrine of indisputable citizenship, so that if a corporation of one State, indisputably *563taken, for the purpose of Federal jurisdiction, to be composed of citizens of such State, is authorized by the law of another State to do business therein, and to be endowed, for local purposes, with all the powers and privileges of a domestic corporation, such adopted corporation shall be deemed to be composed of citizens of the second State, in such a sense as to confer jurisdiction on the Federal courts at the suit of a citizen of the State of its original creation. We are unwilling to sanction such an extension of a doctrine which, as heretofore established, went to the very verge of judicial power.

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