Mr. Justice HARLAN, dissenting.
The Court's opinion in these appeals, and some of the things said in Local No. 438 Const. and General Laborers' Union, AFL-CIO v. Curry, 371 U.S. 542, 83 S.Ct. 531, cut deeply into the statutory requirement of 'finality' limiting our jurisdiction to review state court judgments.
That requirement is more than a technical rule of procedure, yielding when need be to the exigencies of particular situations. Rather, it is a long-standing and healthy federal policy that protects litigants and courts from the disruptions of piecemeal review and forecloses this Court from passing on constitutional issues that may be dissipated by the final outcome of a case, thus helping to keep to a minimum undesirable federal-state conflicts. In this instance it precludes, in my opinion, the exercise of our appellate jurisdiction at this stage of the proceedings.
The state court judgments now sought to be reviewed are nothing more than a determination that venue was properly laid in the county where suit against these appellants was brought. Such a determination, being tantamount to a denial of a motion to dismiss is a classic example of an interlocutory ruling that is only a step towards ultimate disposition and is not in itself reviewable as a final judgment. See Catlin v. United States, 324 U.S. 229, 65 S.Ct. 631, 89 L.Ed. 911; 6 Moore, Federal Practice 54.12(1), 54.14; see also Clinton Foods v. United States, 4 Cir., 188 F.2d 289, 291 -292, and cases cited therein. It fits squarely within the general rule that a judgment is not final unless it terminates the litigation and leaves nothing to be done but to enforce by execution what has been demanded. See Parr v. United States, 351 U.S. 513, 76 S.Ct. 912, 100 L.Ed. 1377.
It is true that several specific, and narrowly circumscribed, exceptions to this general rule have been developed in order to deal with extraordinary situations where a judgment is final in substance although not in form. But these appeals do not fall within any of these exceptions.
Thus this is not a situation in which what remains to be done in the state courts is a mere formality, or in which the appellants concede that their whole case must stand or fall on the federal claim. Compare Richfield Oil Corp. v. State Board of Equalization, 329 U.S. 69, 67 S.Ct. 156, 91 L.Ed. 80; Pope v. Atlantic Coast Line R. Co., 345 U.S. 379, 73 S.Ct. 749, 97 L.Ed. 1094; Local No. 438 Const. and General Laborers' Union, AFL-CIO v. Curry, 371 U.S. 542, 83 S.Ct. 531. Quite the contrary, appellants vigorously deny their liability on the merits of the appellee's claim.
Nor is this a case like Radio Station WOW v. Johnson, 326 U.S. 120, 65 S.Ct. 1475, 89 L.Ed. 2092, where the challenged order required an immediate transfer of property, and where the remaining matters left to be disposed of in the state court were wholly unrelated, would almost certainly have raised no federal question, and could not have mooted the question sought to be reviewed. Here, a victory for appellants on the merits would clearly moot the federal question before us today. 'It is of course not our province to discourage appeals. But for the soundest of reasons we ought not to pass on constitutional issues before they have reached a definitive stop.' Republic Natural Gas Co. v. Oklahoma, 334 U.S. 62, 71, 68 S.Ct. 972, 978, 92 L.Ed. 1212.
On the other hand, if appellants lost on the merits, the venue question raised in the present appeals would then be open for review by this Court. Hence the controversy is wholly different from Cohen v. Beneficial Industrial Loan Corp., 337 U.S. 541, 546, 69 S.Ct. 1221, 1225, 93 L.Ed. 1528, where the challenged order would not have been merged in the final judgment and where, unless immediate review had been granted, no appellate determination of the right claimed could ever have been obtained.