Court Opinion

ID: 9833237
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 22:33:23.216989+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:44:00.812197
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
On' March 1, a motion for rehearing was filed for appellee by his attorney of record, W. T. Carlton, which was followed by another motion for rehearing for appellee by another attorney of record, P.' G. Greenwood, on March 5. Both attorneys live in the same town, and there was evidently a lack of concert of action, and the second motion should not have -been filed. The motions are quite similar, although the second is more radical, for it states that this court is not only in conflict with one of its former decisions in the case of Keller v. Alexander, 24 Tex. Civ. App. 186, 58 S. W. 637, but has discovered that the statutes and decisions of Texas, cited by this court, are “archaic,” and the opinion is in conflict with the Negotiable Instruments Law and decisions in various states, and, worse than all, “is in direct conflict with the spirit of the full faith and credit provision of the Constitution of the United States and the statutes enacted pursuant thereto.” <
It may be antiquated, old-fashioned, or, to be more elegant, “archaic,” to uphold a statute of Texas as against an attempted disregard of it by a citizen of Minnesota, but this court will continue to enforce our statutes as best it can, however “Mid-Victorian” it may be.
The opinion of this court is not in conflict with any of the authorities cited by appel-lee. It was held in the case of Keller v. Alexander, by this court, that a note indorsed in blank by executors of an estate transfers the legal title to the holder and gives him the absolute right of action. There was not one word of testimony in that case to' show other than a valid assignment of the note. The executors had the absolute right to make the indorsement. There was no intimation in that case, nor in any other Texas case, that a foreign executor can indorse a note to another for the avowed purpose of giving authority to institute a suit in another state and recover for the estate on a claim upon which the executor himself could not recover.
In this case it is admitted that the indorsement was made to appellee for the purpose alone of enabling him to collect a claim in a Texas court for a foreign executor in defiance of the laws of Texas. Usually an indorsement for collection would authorize the in-dorsee to prosecute a suit on the note in his own name, but not when that indorsement is not made in good faith but to subvert and evade the law. No court has ever sought to enunciate or establish as vicious a doctrine as that would be.
The motion for rehearing is overruled.