206
Opinion of the Court
the plaintiff or his assignee has pending in any other court any suit or process against the United States or any person who, at the time when the cause of action alleged in such suit or process arose, was, in respect thereto, acting or professing to act, directly or indirectly under the authority of the United States." 2
The lineage of this text runs back more than a century to the aftermath of the Civil War, when residents of the Confederacy who had involuntarily parted with property (usually cotton) during the war sued the United States for compensation in the Court of Claims, under the Abandoned Property Collection Act, ch. 120, 12 Stat. 820 (1863). When these cotton claimants had difficulty meeting the statutory condition that they must have given no aid or comfort to participants in the rebellion, see § 3 of the Act, they resorted to separate suits in other courts seeking compensation not from the Government as such but from federal officials, and not under the statutory cause of action but on tort theories such as conversion. See Schwartz, Section 1500 of the Judicial Code and Duplicate Suits Against the Government and Its Agents, 55 Geo. L. J. 573, 574-580 (1967). It was these duplicative lawsuits that induced Congress to prohibit anyone from filing or prosecuting in the Court of Claims "any claim . . . for or in respect to which he . . . shall have commenced and has pending" an action in any other court against an officer or agent of the United States. Act of June 25, 1868, ch. 71, § 8, 15 Stat. 77. The statute has long outlived the cotton claimants, having been incorporated
2 When Keene filed its complaints, § 1500 referred to the "Court of Claims" rather than the "United States Court of Federal Claims." See 28 U. S. C. § 1500 (1976 ed.). Section 1500 has since been amended twice, first to substitute "United States Claims Court" for "Court of Claims," Federal Courts Improvement Act of 1982, § 133(e)(1), 96 Stat. 40, and then to substitute "Court of Federal Claims" for "Claims Court," Court of Federal Claims Technical and Procedural Improvements Act of 1992, § 902(a), 106 Stat. 4516. See also n. 1, supra.
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