Record
Court opinion
1942-08-07
CourtListener (Free Law Project), text of the opinion
Ratner v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 6 F.R.D. 618 (S.D.N.Y. 1942)
A federal stockholders' suit to make Paramount's officers and directors account for "corporate funds allegedly paid by them to one Willie Bioff, to induce him not to cause a strike" was dismissed on 7 August 1942, the state-court judgment in the Hornstein actions being res judicata.
- Date
- 1942-08-07
- Kind
- court-opinion
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Rights
- Opinion of a United States court. Works of the federal judiciary are in the public domain in the United States (17 U.S.C. § 105), and judicial opinions carry no copyright. The text was read on CourtListener.
District Court for the Southern District of New York, decided 7 August 1942, Judge Bright. CourtListener gives no docket number.
Two Paramount stockholders sued “to compel the defendants who are or were officers or directors of Paramount, to account to it for corporate funds allegedly paid by them to one Willie Bioff, to induce him not to cause a strike among certain of the company’s employees.” Similar stockholders’ actions brought in the New York Supreme Court by Henry Hornstein and others had been consolidated, “tried on the merits before Mr. Justice Walter in June 1942, and resulted in a judgment dismissing the complaint upon the merits,” entered on July 3, 1942.
The parties conceded that the issues and defendants were the same. Holding that “A judgment in the stockholders’ derivative action is res judicata both as to the corporation and as to all of its stockholders,” the court allowed the defendants to plead the state judgment and granted summary judgment. The New York Court of Appeals affirmed the state judgment in 1944, in Hornstein v. Paramount Pictures.
The opinion prints most defendants by surname only. It says nothing about the criminal case beyond the allegation of payments to Bioff.