Court Opinion

ID: 9833946
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 23:10:37.035332+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:44:09.648002
License: Public Domain

On Rehearing.
We have considered motions for additional findings of fact and for rehearing. We are asked to find as an additional fact that if effect be given to calls for course and distances from an indisputably located corner of a certain 110-acre tract, a part of the Smith 200-acre tract, such 110-acre tract will include the strip of land in controversy.
It may be doubted if the Court of Civil Appeals is under any duty to find undisputed facts. What the undisputed evidence in a case shows is a question of law, of which the Supreme Court has jurisdiction, the same as a court of civil appeals, and does not, therefore, come within the exclusive fact finding jurisdiction of the latter.
*610The additional fact we are requested to find, if true, would only be evi-dentiary and not conclusive of the only issue in the case, namely, the location as contended by plaintiffs in error of the east boundary line of the Smith 200-acre tfaGt. Our fact-finding duty does not extend to the finding of merely evidentiary facts not in themselves conclusive of any issue in the case.
Defendants in error in their motion for rehearing indicate a misunderstanding of our opinion upon one point. What we said on the subject of locating a tract of land by courses and distances from an indisputedly established corner and a state of facts under which that principle could not apply, had no reference to the 110-acre tract. If the northeast and southeast corners of the 110-acre tract, and the line connecting them as the east boundary line of the 110-acre tract, had been shown conclusively to be coincident with the corners and line contended by plaintiffs in error to be the corners and line of the Smith 200-acre tract, that would not have established conclusively the issue which plaintiffs in error had the burden of establishing. That burden was to show the true location of the east boundary line of the Smith 200-acre tract, according to their allegations. The fact that the parties to the conveyance of the 110-acre tract may have thought it to be at a particular place and so located it, would be no more conclusive upon the issue which plaintiffs in error had to establish than the evidence that the surveyor in surveying lots 1 and 2 thought he was locating the west boundary lines thereof coincident with the east boundary 'line oí the Smith 200-acre tract would be conclusive that they were coincident. If there was no other evidence to show the location of the east boundary line of the Smith 200-acre tract to be as plaintiffs contended than such as was afforded by the deeds conveying and instruments relating to the 110-acre tract, then defendants in error would, perhaps, have been entitled to an instructed verdict in their favor.
There was other evidence which, if true, tended, we think, to show that the northeast and southeast corners and connecting line of the Smith 200-acre tract were located as contended by plaintiffs in error. In fact, except as affected by propositions of law which were overruled, there was no question presented to this court of the total lack of evidence, or insufficiency of the evidence, to raise an issue of fact as to the location of the east boundary line of the Smith 200-acre tract. A restudy of the case fails to convince us that such an issue of fact was not raised.
The motions for additional findings of fact and for rehearing are therefore overruled.