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Opinion of the Court
is "privity" or some other special relationship between the two sets of plaintiffs. Hence, the Case Two plaintiffs here are "strangers" to Case One, and for the reasons we explained in Richards, they cannot be bound by the earlier judgment.
The Alabama trial court tried to distinguish the circumstances before us from those in Richards by pointing out that the plaintiffs here were aware of the earlier Reynolds Metals litigation and that one of the Reynolds Metals lawyers also represented the Bell plaintiffs. See Mem. Op. 18a- 19a. These circumstances, however, created no special representational relationship between the earlier and later plaintiffs. Nor could these facts have led the later plaintiffs to expect to be precluded, as a matter of res judicata, by the earlier judgment itself, even though they may well have expected that the rule of law announced in Reynolds Metals would bind them in the same way that a decided case binds every citizen.
A concurring justice in the Alabama Supreme Court concluded that the Bell plaintiffs had "agreed that the final decision in Reynolds Metals would be controlling" when, in a letter to the trial court, they "specifically requested that [their] case be held in abeyance until Reynolds Metals was decided." 711 So. 2d, at 1006-1007 (opinion of Maddox, J.). That letter also said, however, that if " 'either party desires to proceed at a later date, with the Court's permission this case would be activated.' " Id., at 1006. Given this latter statement, the letter is no more than a routine request for continuance. It does not distinguish Richards.
In sum, if the Alabama Supreme Court's holding in this case rests on state-law claim or issue preclusion (res judicata or collateral estoppel), that holding is inconsistent with Richards and with the Fourteenth Amendment's due process guarantee.
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