court must strike a balance between the interest of the litigant against whom preclusion is asserted and repetitious and needless litigation which burdens court dockets
How later courts described this case
- court must strike a balance between the interest of the litigant against whom preclusion is asserted and repetitious and needless litigation which burdens court dockets
- defining a privy as “one who, after rendition of the judgment, has acquired an interest in the subject matter” (emphasis added)
- collateral estoppel generally requires mutuality so that the litigants in the second suit must have been parties or privy to parties in the first suit
- res judicata applies “where a party to one action in his individual capacity and to another in his representative capacity is in each case asserting or protecting his individual rights”
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Black, J.
(concurring). Not caring to join the Court’s unnecessary waltz around the country to the variable outstate music of estoppel by judgment, and being quite content with the concededly applicable value of our own pertinent precedents, particularly Clark v. Naufel (1950), 328 Mich 249 (syll. # 4), I concur in reversal.
Judge Quinn, dissenting below ( 20 Mich App 140, 147 ), was quite right in applying Clark v. Naufel, and in calling it to the attention of two Brethren *53 whose choice it was to ignore that authority in favor of a new doctrine. That doctrine was drawn apparently, but quite erroneously, from Justice Cooley’s opinion of Fifield v. Edwards (1878), 39 Mich 264 . The holding there was that an estoppel by previous judgment cannot prevail where the specific claim in question was actually excluded from judicial consideration in the first action.
T. Gr. Kavanagh, J., did not sit in this case.