Litigation

Last week in the fifth round of its long and litigious effort to tag Aluminum Co. of America as a monopoly, Baush Machine Tool Co. received a sharp and sudden jolt. Most aluminum fabricators can use scrap but the chemistry of the Baush product requires pure ingot aluminum, which the company has to buy abroad (over a 4-c- per Ib. tariff) or from Aluminum Co. of America, sole domestic source. The Baush management regards Aluminum as an unfair enterprise. Aluminum's opinion of Baush was summed up by an Aluminum lawyer who, noting the company's succession of deficits, remarked that the Springfield concern seemed primarily engaged in the "lawsuit business."

Baush first filed suit against the Mellon company in 1928. That suit was dismissed. Three years later Baush marched into court with a bill of particulars, accusing Aluminum Co. of nearly every unfair business practice imaginable. Baush asked $3,000,000 in damages, $6,000,000 punitive penalties under the Anti-Trust laws. After a three-month trial, a New Haven jury gave Aluminum the verdict. On appeal Baush won a retrial.

Last March after sitting for nine weeks listening to 1,000,000 words of testimony, puzzling over 600 exhibits, a Hartford, Conn, jury gave Baush the verdict, awarding $956,000 damages, which U. S. District Judge Harland Bradley Howe promptly and punitively tripled (TIME, March 16). Baush was also allowed $300,000 for attorney's fee.*

This time Aluminum appealed. Last week in Manhattan, in a 2-to-1 decision, the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the Baush verdict, sent the case back, with a stinging rebuke to Judge Howe, for its third trial. ^

*Baush counsel was Cummings & Lockivood, the Connecticut law firm of Attorney General Cummings, who once lost another Aluminum case, has never forgotten it.

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