Court Opinion

ID: 9442861
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:02:02.519111+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:15.717684
License: Public Domain

On Petition for Rehearing.
MAGRUDER, Chief Judge.
Appellee has filed a brief petition for rehearing which, without otherwise challenging our analysis of the applicable statute and the authorities, fixes on a single sentence of our previous opinion the purport of which he completely misapprehends.
The sentence referred to is as follows:
“Where only non-negotiable receipts are involved, it is entirely reasonable that the warehouseman should be able without prejudice to allow a customer to withdraw part of his goods from the warehouse without paying the charges thereon, so long as the warehouseman retains other goods of the customer which are amply sufficient in value to serve as security for the debt on the general account.”
Appellee argues that the record does not warrant a finding that, as the bankrupt withdrew fish from the warehouse without payment of the respective charges thereon the warehouseman retained other fish of the bankrupt sufficient in value to serve as security for the debt on the general account; that on the basis of the above-quoted sentence in our opinion, for example, no lien could be enforced against the fish of the bankrupt deposited with the warehouseman in November of 1949 for thé charges due on fish which had been surrendered to the bankrupt many months earlier; that therefore the scope and extent of the warehouseman’s lien as claimed by appellant warehouseman herein is considerably greater than the scope and extent of the warehouseman’s lien as defined by this court.
We thought it was clear enough from our opinion as a whole that the above sentence was not intended to define and limit the scope of the warehouseman’s lien. It was only an argument to support the reasonableness and good sense, both from the point of view of the warehouseman and of the depositor, of our interpretation of the statutory lien as being a general rather than a specific one. Of course, if the warehouseman permits the withdrawal of all the goods on deposit at a particular time, without payment of the charges thereon, he gives up the lien for the time being and becomes an unsecured creditor. The warehouseman can do this if he chooses. But if later the depositor puts other goods in the warehouse, the lien, being a general one, will entitle the warehouseman to hold such goods as security not only for the charges thereon, but also for the unpaid charges on the general account. This follows from the very nature of a general lien. It does not matter when the goods, upon which the lien is asserted, were deposited; that is apparent from the language of § 33 of the Massachusetts Act, “Against all goods, whenever deposited, * * *” [italics added]. We had already pointed this out in a sentence earlier in our opinion, as follows: “Thus, reading the two sections together, if the claims in regard to which the lien is asserted are the types of charges defined in § 27, Mass. § 32, the lien therefor is, by force of § 28(a), Mass. § 33(a), a general one good against ‘all goods, whenever deposited, belonging to the person who is liable as debtor’ for such charges.”
The petition for rehearing is denied.