Potter Stewart

“ In the ordinary course the regular venue rules are to prevail, with no preliminary litigation to determine the actual convenience. But the statute means to allow for cases where the ordinary rules are found to work a great hardship; there, actual convenience is to prevail. We should therefore not, as the Court has done, impose limitations upon the operation of § 1404 (a) which have no relation to ordinary considerations governing the place of trial in the federal system and which arbitrarily prevent actual convenience from determining the place of trial. ”

“ In moving for transfer to B, the defendant stipulates to waiving all objections to venue there and to submitting his person to the jurisdiction of District Court B, should transfer be ordered. The District Court in A agrees that B, not A, is the appropriate place for trial and is disposed to transfer the action there, for in light of the defendant's stipulation there is no way in which the plaintiff can be prejudiced by the lack of venue in B or the impossibility, as an original matter, of serving defendant there. ”

“ In fact, the Court's rephrasing, as distinguished from Congress' phrasing, gives the narrowest possible scope to the operation of § 1404 (a) . There can be expected to be very few, if any, alternative forums in a given case where the plaintiff has a 'right' to sue, considering that that means places of unobjectionable venue where the defendant is amenable to service of process and where there are no other impediments such as a statute of limitations which the defendant can rely on to defeat the action. ”

“ Nothing is to be gained by parceling out the areas of their discretion mechanically, making distinctions which have no relevance to the manner in which venue provisions are ordinarily administered in the federal courts. I would therefore permit considerations of 'convenience' and 'justice' to be operative whenever the defendant consents to going forward in the transferee court on the same terms on which he was sued in the original forum. Against a rare abuse, there will always be available the corrective supervisory power of the Courts of Appeals, and ultimately of this Court. ”

“ One would have to be singularly unmindful of the treachery and versatility of our language to deny that as a mere matter of English the words 'where it might have been brought' may carry more than one meaning. ”

“ The occasion for the Fifth Circuit's review by way of mandamus may have been, as the Court suggests, 'to protect its appellate jurisdiction,' but there can be no question that the Fifth Circuit undertook to and did resolve on its merits the controversy between the parties regarding the meaning of § 1404 (a) . Yet the Court decides that the review in the Fifth Circuit was so much wasted motion, properly ignored by the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in arriving at a contrary result. ”