Court Opinion

ID: 9576174
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:21:26.13769+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:02:10.655996
License: Public Domain

MR. JUSTICE DAVIS
(dissenting) :
I think that this appeal is properly before us on a record certified in substantial compliance with R. C. M. 1947, sections 93-8017 and 93-5508; but on the merits I do not agree with the conclusion which the majority has reached in its opinion.
I shall of course confine myself to a discussion alone of the two narrow questions which that opinion answers. Moreover, in doing so I shall indicate but shortly the grounds of my disagreement; upon the details of that disagreement I shall not elaborate.
*73More than a half century ago our attachment statutes were enacted as section 890, et seq., Code of Civil Procedure, 1895. No chapter of our Codes since has been more constantly read, interpreted and applied by the bench and the bar of this state than that dealing with the writ of attachment. No part of our adjective law at this date should be better understood alike by judge and lawyer in Montana than R. C. M. 1947, sec. 93-4301, which stipulates when a plaintiff may have the property of a defendant attached. It is a reproach to our law that confusion is to be found here at this late date.
Yet at bar this court is again wrestling with what are fundamentally the .same questions answered some fifty years ago in Ancient Order of Hibernians, Division No. 1, of Anaconda v. Sparrow, 29, Mont. 132, 74 Pac. 197, 64 L. R. A. 128, 101 Am. St. Rep. 563, which the majority opinion cites, and forty years ago in State ex rel. Malin-Yates Co. v. Justice of Peace Court, 51 Mont. 133, 149 Pac. 709, which the majority does not mention. A generation later Gilna v. Barker, 78 Mont. 343, 254 Pac. 169, first applied the reason and the rule of the Sparrow decision to a bilateral contract, which we have in this case, and defined for us on this appeal, I think, what our statute, sec. 93-4301, supra, means in this case when it speaks of a “contract, express or implied, for the direct payment of money”. To read the record at bar in the light of our conclusion in the Barker case, which also the majority does not mention, is to answer the first question before us, as I see it. None of the citations in the majority-opinion touches the facts of that record, or of that precedent.
Consistent with Gilna v. Barker, supra, the action here is upon an express contract for the direct payment of a specific sum of' money alleged to be presently due. The attachment levied should therefore be sustained, unless we are to consider and rule the' merits of the action itself. This I take it the majority agrees, we may not do at this time.
Likewise the Malin-Yates decision supplemented by Smith v.. Bunston, 72 Mont. 535, 234 Pac. 836, has been accepted up to-this time without dissent as controlling of the interpretation to. *74be put in this court upon the words “not secured by any mortgage or lien upon real or personal property,” etc., also found in section 93-4301, supra. Consistent with the Malin-Yates and Bunston cases the contract upon which the action here is brought is not secured within the meaning of the statute cited. With these authorities unchallenged in this court I am at a loss to understand why we should look to the California courts for comfort or support. Compare Holt v. Sather, 81 Mont. 442, 455, 456, 264 Pac. 108.
The plainest principles, it seems to me, of the rule of stare decisis apply to the appeal now before us. The decisions to which I have called attention unmentioned by the majority should be followed; the order which the majority has reversed will then be upheld. Time has foreclosed any proper inquiry today into the questions here considered, which have both been authoritatively answered by this court long since.
I seriously doubt whether either question which the majority opinion has decided is properly presented by the motion made in the trial court to dissolve and by the proceedings had at the hearing there on that motion. But I lay these doubts aside in reaching the conclusion to which I have come in this matter. I would affirm the order of the nisi prius judge, and, as I read the record, upon substantially the same grounds which he found good insofar as he had the opportunity to consider and pass upon them.