William Gluckin & Co. v. Int’l. Playtex Corp., 407 F.2d 177 (2d Cir. 1969), is an opinion upholding the issuance of a prelim­inary injunction against Playtex, manu­fac­turer of, ahem, ladies’ support garments, prohibiting Playtex from pros­e­cuting a lawsuit it had filed against Woolworth & Co. for selling brassieres manu­fac­tured by Gluckin at Woolworth’s stores in Georgia. See, what happened was this: Playtex had a patent, and Gluckin (allegedly) infringed the patent and sold the infringing unmen­tion­ables to Woolworths, who sold lots of them in Georgia. Woolworth’s, Playtex, and Gluckin were all New York corpo­ra­tions amenable to suit in New York, but Gluckin was not amenable to suit in Georgia. Playtex sued Woolworth’s for infringing its patent in Federal court in Georgia. Gluckin found out and filed their own suit (for a declaratory judgment) in Federal court in New York.

See, if the Georgia suit went ahead, the Georgia District Court would have had to determine whether the bust supporters sold by Woolworth’s indeed infringed Playtex’ patent. This would be the same issue as what would have to be decided in the declaratory judgment action in New York. So if the Georgia court made a decision on the subject, that decision would have had a binding effect on the New York court under the doctrine of res judicata. (Woolworth’s probably could have had the Georgia case dismissed for failure to join a necessary party who could not subse­quently be joined because of a lack of personal juris­diction, see Fed. R. Civ. P. 19, but that’s not what happened.)

Gluckin, therefore, really wanted to make sure it had the oppor­tunity to litigate the patent infringement issue itself in the New York suit, and not by proxy through Woolworth’s in the Georgia suit. But ordi­narily, the suit that gets filed first gets priority, and later suits get enjoined until earlier ones get finished.

Fortunately for Gluckin, there is an exception to this first-​​filed-​​goes-​​first rule, arising out of patent law. An infringement suit against a customer of a manu­fac­turer always has the manu­fac­turer as the real party in interest, and the policy of the Second Circuit is to place pref­erence on the real party in interest liti­gating his own claim, so long as it is more conve­nient than the customer suit. Which is why Gluckin got the injunction against the Georgia suit.

Anyway, I’m sure all you peoples out there who don’t care about civil procedure were bored to tears reading about all that.

On a more enter­taining note, reading this case reminded me of this fun yet highly inac­curate account of the invention and patenting of the brassiere from the ultra–tear-​​jerker film Beaches, starring Bette Midler and some other people whose names I cannot remember.