SUITS BY A STATE AS PARENS PATRIAE; JURISDICTION DECLINED
The distinction between suits brought by States to protect the welfare of the people as a whole and suits to protect the private interests of individual citizens is not easily drawn. In Oklahoma ex rel. Johnson v. Cook,[498] the Court dismissed a suit brought by Oklahoma to enforce the statutory liability of a stockholder of a State bank then in the process of liquidation through a State officer. Although the State was vested with legal title to the assets under the liquidation procedure, the State's action was independent of that and it was acting merely for the benefit of the bank's creditors and depositors. A generation earlier the Court refused jurisdiction of Oklahoma v. Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe R. Co.[499] in which Oklahoma sought to enjoin unreasonable rate charges by a railroad on the shipment of specified commodities, inasmuch as the State was not engaged in shipping these commodities and had no proprietary interest in them.
SUITS BY A STATE AS PARENS PATRIAE; JURISDICTION ACCEPTED
Georgia v. Evans,[500] on the other hand, presents the case of a clear State interest as a purchaser of materials. Here, Georgia sued certain asphalt companies for treble damages under the Sherman Act arising allegedly out of a conspiracy to control the prices of asphalt of which Georgia was a large purchaser. The matter of Georgia's interest was not contested and did not arise. The case is primarily significant for the ruling that a State is a person under section 7 of the Sherman Act authorizing suits by "any person" for treble damages arising out of violations of the Sherman Act. A less clear-cut case, and one not altogether in accord with Oklahoma v. Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe R. Co.,[501] is Georgia v. Pennsylvania R. Co.[502] in which the State, suing as parens patriae and in its proprietary capacity, was permitted to file a bill of complaint against twenty railroads for injunctive relief from freight rates, allegedly discriminatory against the State and asserted to have been fixed through coercive action by the northern roads against the southern roads in violation of the 16th section of the Clayton Act. Although the rights of Georgia were admittedly based on federal laws, the Court indicated that the enforcement of the Sherman and Clayton acts depends upon civil as well as criminal sanctions. Moreover, the interests of a State for purposes of invoking the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court were held, as in Georgia v. Tennessee Copper Co.,[503] not to be confined to those which are proprietary but to "embrace the so-called 'quasi-sovereign' interests which * * * are 'independent of and behind the titles of its citizens, in all the earth and air within its domain.'"[504]
GEORGIA v. PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD
In the course of his opinion Justice Douglas, speaking for a narrowly divided Court, treated the alleged injury to Georgia as a proprietor as a "makeweight," and remarked that the "original jurisdiction of this Court is one of the mighty instruments which the framers of the Constitution provided so that adequate machinery might be available for the peaceful settlement of disputes between States and between a State and citizens of another State * * * Trade barriers, recriminations, intense commercial rivalries had plagued the colonies. The traditional methods available to a sovereign for the settlement of such disputes were diplomacy and war. Suit in this Court was provided as an alternative."[505] Discriminatory freight rates, said he, may cause a blight no less serious than noxious gases in that they may arrest the development of a State and put it at a competitive disadvantage. "Georgia as a representative of the public is complaining of a wrong which, if proven, limits the opportunities of her people, shackles her industries, retards her development, and relegates her to an inferior economic position among her sister States. These are matters of grave public concern in which Georgia has an interest apart from that of particular individuals who may be affected. Georgia's interest is not remote; it is immediate. If we denied Georgia as parens patriae the right to invoke the original jurisdiction of the Court in a matter of that gravity, we would whittle the concept of justiciability down to the stature of minor or conventional controversies. There is no warrant for such a restriction."[506]
Controversies Between Citizens of Different States
THE MEANING OF "STATE"; HEPBURN v. ELLZEY
Despite stringent definitions of the words "citizen" and "State" and strict statutory safeguards against abuse of the jurisdiction arising out of it, the diversity of citizenship clause is one of the more prolific sources of federal jurisdiction. In Hepburn v. Ellzey,[507] Chief Justice Marshall, speaking for the Court, confined the meaning of the word "State," as used in the Constitution, to "the members of the American confederacy" and ruled that a citizen of the District of Columbia could not sue a citizen of Virginia on the basis of diversity of citizenship. In the course of his brief opinion Marshall owned that it was "extraordinary that the courts of the United States, which are open to aliens, and to the citizens of every State in the union should be closed" to the residents of the District, but the situation, he indicated, was "a subject for legislative, not for judicial consideration."[508] The same restrictive rule was later extended to citizens of territories of the United States.[509]