Source: https://www.legalcrystal.com/case/92921/union-trust-co-vs-grosman
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 04:17:35+00:00

Document:
offices to enforce obligations good by the lex domicilii and the lex loci contractus against those whom the local laws have no duty to protect.
By the law of Texas -- the common law modified by statute -- a married woman's guaranty of her husband's note is not enforceable against her separate property. In this case, note and guaranty were part of one transaction, but the guaranty was a separate instrument executed by the wife alone.
If a contract, made and valid in one state, is unenforceable in the courts of another on ground of local public policy, it is unenforceable also, for the same reason, in the district court sitting in the latter state and having jurisdiction through diversity of citizenship.
This is a suit brought by the petitioner in the District Court of the United States for the Northern District of Texas upon two promissory notes made in Chicago by Hiram Grosman and another, and a continuing guaranty executed in the same place by the respondent, Mrs. Grosman, the wife of Hiram Grosman, as part of the same transaction as the earlier note. A decree was rendered for the plaintiff in the district court, but, upon appeal by Mrs. Grosman, was reversed as against her by the circuit court of appeals on the ground that it subjected her separate property to the payment of the demand, contrary to the public policy of the state in which the suit was brought. 228 F. 610. Mrs. Grosman and her husband were domiciled in Texas, as the plaintiff seems to have known, and made the contracts while temporarily in Chicago. We assume for the moment that, if she had given the guaranty in Texas, it would have been void, and, on the other hand, that if she had been domiciled in Illinois when she made her promise, she would have been bound. The main question is which law is to prevail.
power to hold her to performance, whatever may be the law of her domicile. It might be urged that the contract should be given elsewhere the effect that the law of the place of making might have insured by physical force. See Michigan Trust Co. v. Ferry, 228 U. S. 346 , 228 U. S. 353 . On the other hand, it is obvious that, practically, at least, no state would take any steps, if it could, before a breach of an undertaking like this. The contract being a continuing one of uncertain duration, the plaintiff had notice that, in case of a breach, it probably might have to resort to the defendant's domicile for a remedy, as it did in fact. In such a case, very possibly an Illinois court might decide that a woman could not lay hold of a temporary absence from her domicile to create remedies against her in that domicile that the law there did not allow her to create, and therefore that the contract was void. This has been held concerning a contract made with a more definite view to the disregard of the laws of a neighboring state. Graves v. Johnson, 156 Mass. 211, 212.
for a court to decline to be an instrument for depriving citizens belonging to the jurisdiction of their property in ways not intended by the law that governs them, another to deny its offices to enforce obligations good by the lex domicilii and the lex loci contractus against women that the local laws have no duty to protect. International Harvester Co. v. McAdam, 142 Wis. 114; Merrielles v. State Bank of Keokuk, 5 Tex.Civ.App. 483. The case of Milliken v. Pratt, 125 Mass. 374, went to the verge of the law in holding a Massachusetts woman liable in Massachusetts on a contract that she could not have made there, because made by a letter in Maine, although her person remained always within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. It is safe to conjecture that the decision would have been different if the law of Massachusetts had not been changed before the bringing of the suit so as to allow such contracts to be made. 125 Mass. 377, 383.
612; First State Bank of Tomball v. Tinkham, 195 S.W. 880.
If the decree would have been right in a court of the State of Texas, it was right in a district court of the United States sitting in the same state. Pritchard v. Norton, 106 U. S. 124 , 106 U. S. 129 .

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