Court Opinion

ID: 9833850
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 23:05:33.024547+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:44:07.725109
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
Plaintiffs in error have filed an appealing motion for rehearing, which this court has carefully considered. It is earnestly urged that the minors, through plaintiffs in error as next friends, should be regarded as parties to this appeal, and thereby bound by the record presented here.
It is the prerogative, as well as the duty, of all courts to regard and protect, within lawful bounds, the rights of infants, as well as of all others laboring under disabilities which prevent them from protecting their own rights against fully armed and empowered adversaries. This court has not been unmindful of this duty in this case.
In considering the record for the purpose of determining the question of jurisdiction involved in defendant in error’s motion to dismiss the appeal, it has been necessary, and therefore proper, to go somewhat deeply into the record. We have examined the pleadings and proceedings, step by step. We have particularly scrutinized the pleadings of plaintiffs in error. Those pleadings are at best general and vague, and consist more of mere conclusions than of allegations of specific facts justifying such conclusions. Certainly they would be subject to special exceptions which would nullify their effect, even if they could survive the general demurrer. It is unnecessary, would be improper, for this court, in this inquiry as to jurisdiction, to examine or consider the evidence upon the trial. The transcript of the record, however, shows that the trial judge found and expressed facts which, if supported by evidence, completely negative the conclusions embraced in plaintiffs in error’s pleadings below. It is deemed appropriate to add that counsel presenting plaintiffs in error’s motion for rehearing were not responsible for' the record made below.
Now, it is that sort of record by which plaintiffs in error seek, in resisting the • motion to dismiss, to bind the helpless minors for whom they now, for the first time, purport to act. For, if this court should take jurisdiction, and undertake to decide the cause upon its merits as if the minors were in fact parties through plaintiffs in error’s intervention, the minors would be precluded from hereafter asserting a remedy for the wrongs so vaguely and indefinitely pleaded by plaintiffs in error below, and so definitely and positively denied by the trial judge upon the hearing. Whereas, if this court declines to assume jurisdiction, the minors, if indeed wronged by their guardian, would be free to efficiently assert their remedy under the laws of the land, untrammeled by an adjudication invoked in their absence.
This court adheres to the decision that the minors were not parties to the proceeding below, except through the legal guardian of their estates, and that plaintiffs in error, acting below only as individuals, cannot now, without an adequate showing of their right to intervene here in the asserted representative capacity (Cochrane v. Day, 27 Tex. 385), prosecute this writ of error as next friends of the minors. This court will not go out of its way to subject the minors to the jeopardy of an apparently bungled record to which they were not parties, and by which they are *621not bound, except through the representation of their legal guardian, who is responsible to them if it has betrayed the trust in the manner so vaguely alleged by plaintiffs in error. Plaintiffs in error’s motion for rehearing will, therefore, be overruled.
It is deemed appropriate, in view of some observations in the original opinion, to express the conclusion that, although plaintiffs in error and their contest were not expressly disposed of in the judgment, that judgment was nevertheless a final judgment, since it made that disposition of plaintiffs in error and their contest by necessary implication. For, in rendering a decree approving defendant in error’s claim, the judgment had the necessary effect of denying plaintiffs in error’s contest, and precluding ^plaintiffs in error just as effectively and finally, as if done by express language.
It is perhaps unnecessary to add, what is so,obviously true, that what has been said in this and the original opinion is decisive only of the question of jurisdiction, and is not intended, and cannot be given effect, as decisive of any other question than that of jurisdiction.
Plaintiffs in error’s motion for rehearing is overruled.