Court Opinion

ID: 9695924
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 18:31:27.998738+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:17.407155
License: Public Domain

POMEROY, Justice,
concurring.
By its decision today the Court needlessly perpetuates a procedural anomaly, the basis for which was eliminated by the adoption in 1968 of the new Article V of the Pennsylvania Constitution. Although the correct result is reached, I cannot agree with the rationale of the majority opinion; hence this separate statement. Section 1 of Article V provides as follows:
“The judicial power of the Commonwealth shall be vested in a unified judicial system consisting of the Supreme Court, the Superior Court, the Commonwealth Court, courts of common pleas, community courts, municipal and traffic courts in the City of Philadelphia, such other courts as may be provided by law and justices of the peace. All courts and justices of the peace and their jurisdiction shall be in this unified judicial system.”
Thus under the new Constitution there is no longer a separate and independent orphans’ court. Like other pre-1968 courts, the orphans’ court is now part of the newly constituted court of common pleas, a court in which is vested “unlimited original jurisdiction in all cases except as may otherwise be provided by law”. Constitution of Pennsylvania, Art. V, Sec. 5.
The issue presented by this case is not one of jurisdiction, but of whether or not the orphans’ court division is the proper division of the court of common pleas through which the undoubted jurisdiction of that court is to be exercised to resolve the questions here in dispute. Those questions have to do with the valuation of assets of closely held family corporations created by decedent, *254and with the validity of the transfers during decedent’s lifetime of certain assets by those corporations.
It is true, as the Court points out, that proceedings in the old orphans’ court were not considered to be either “at law or in equity” for purposes of the Act of 1925,* permitting appeals from interlocutory orders pertaining to jurisdiction; hence appeals from interlocutory decrees of the orphans’ court were not allowed. But those cases are now of historical interest only. The court of common pleas has admitted jurisdiction of the subject matter of the instant disputes. The Act of 1925 should not be applied to allow appeals concerning the presence or absence of subject-matter jurisdiction as between divisions of the court of common pleas. If the jurisdiction over the cause of action is being exercised through the wrong division, the remedy, if a remedy is needed, will be a transfer to the correct division. See Kohl v. Lentz, 454 Pa. 105, 110, 311 A.2d 136, 137 (1973) (concurring opinion of Pomeroy, J.). Also, as the Court’s opinion indicates, an appellant may seek interlocutory review under our appellate rules, See Pa.R.A.P. 312, 1311. Since that was not done here, I agree that the appeal should be quashed.
The fallacy of the Court’s analysis is made clearer if it be assumed that the dispute between the decedent’s widow and son had originated in a suit in equity brought in the civil (or trial) division of the court of common pleas. Had a jurisdictional challenge then been raised on the ground that the controversy was justiciable only through the orphans’ court division,, presumably, under the majority’s rationale an appeal would lie under the Act of 1925, since the civil division would have been sitting in equity. Surely, in a unified judicial system, the availability of an appeal right should not depend on which branch of the trial court is first seized of the case.

 Act of March 5, 1925, P.L. 23, § 1, 12 P.S. § 672.