Opinion ID: 2365840
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Whether the action may be maintained in equity

Text: It is true, as appellants here contend, that our predecessors on occasion have stated that a court of equity might not determine whether a person might properly hold an office, that the proper course of action was at law by way of mandamus. We regard the portion of Valle which we have quoted as dispositive of this point. To Valle we would add that all of the holdings cited by the appellants are prior to the enactment in this State of the Uniform Declaratory Judgment Act, now found in Code (1974) § 3-401 to 415, Courts and Judicial Proceedings Article. In Ryan v. Herbert, 186 Md. 453, 458-59, 47 A.2d 360 (1946), and Schultz v. Kaplan, 189 Md. 402, 407, 410, 56 A.2d 17 (1947), Chief Judge Marbury and Judge Collins, respectively, discussed for the Court changes wrought by the passage of that act, specifically, the declaration by way of a preamble by the General Assembly in its reenactment by Chapter 724 of the Acts of 1945. In Schultz the action was brought at law. The appellant contended that the declaration in the case was really in form and substance a bill in equity and that the procedure in [the] case [was] of an equitable nature. The court found issues properly cognizable by a court of law. First of all, it might be said that although membership on a political committee is governed by statute, it is not a public office, as our predecessors held in Usilton v. Bramble, 117 Md. 10, 82 A. 661 (1911), in what must have been one of the first cases to reach this Court after the enactment of the direct primary law and the requirement that party central committee members be elected at such primaries. The Court there held that a statute requiring [e]very candidate for public office to file a report of campaign expenses and an attendant provision that no person should be deemed elected to any elective office until he had filed such statement was not applicable to a member of the Democratic State Central Committee for Kent County so as to void a selection made by members of that committee to fill a vacancy on the ballot. This Court held specifically that the Legislature did not intend to include committeemen in the expression `candidate for public office,' if that expression could otherwise have been said to include them. Be that as it may, we deem it entirely too late in the 20th century to bar sought for relief in an action of this kind upon the premise that it should have been brought in one of the law courts of Baltimore City rather than in one of the equity courts or, in one of the counties of Maryland, on the law side of the docket rather than on the equity side of a circuit court.