Hammell v. Superior Court

WASTE, C. J.

Petitioner, as one of the defendants in an action pending before the respondent Superior Court, seeks by this proceeding to prohibit the respondent Judge from signing findings of fact and entering judgment therein. The request for such relief is grounded upon the claim that the respondent court and judge are without jurisdiction to hear and determine the cause. It appears that the chief of the division of labor statistics and law enforcement commenced an action to collect certain wages, the claims for which had been duly assigned to him for that purpose, owing by the petitioner and his copartners to the plaintiff’s several assignors. No question is here raised as to the legality of the assignments or as to the propriety of the joinder of the several causes of action. Those matters are not of a jurisdictional nature.

Considered separately, the several assigned claims are each less than the jurisdictional minimum of the Superior Court.

[7]

Collectively, however, they exceed such minimum. We must, therefore, determine whether the Superior Court has jurisdiction of an action at law wherein the aggregate of the amounts demanded in the complaint equals or exceeds the amount required to confer jurisdiction upon such court, hut wherein the component parts of the demand are two or more separate causes of action, properly united in one plaintiff, the amount of each of which, standing alone, is less than the jurisdictional minimum of the Superior Court.

While the decisions of other states are not in complete accord upon this proposition (15 Cor. Jur. 768-771, secs. 64, 65; 7 R. C. L. 1055, sec. 91), it has long since been settled in this state that where separate causes of action, properly joinable, are united in a single plaintiff and set forth in a single complaint, the Superior Court has jurisdiction, to the exclusion of inferior courts, if the aggregate of the several claims equals or exceeds the jurisdictional minimum of the Superior Court, although no one of the claims equals such jurisdictional minimum.

(Bailey

v.

Sloan,

65 Cal. 387 [4 Pac. 349];