Court Opinion

ID: 9527575
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:31:38.011411+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:25:54.745804
License: Public Domain

SIMON, Justice
(dissenting).
Being in full accord with the views expressed by my colleague in his dissenting opinion and fully concurring with his analytic application of the penal statute, LSA-R.S. 14:67, I am unable to subscribe to the holding announced in the majority opinion and am convinced that it is repugnant to our laws and jurisprudence on the subject of partnerships, the interrelationship of the partners towards the partnership, the classification of the rights of ownership in and to partnership property and the amenability of partners to the said penal statute LSA-R.S. 14:67, which serves as a basis for this prosecution.
Under LSA-R.S. 14:67, theft is the misappropriation or taking of anything of value which belongs to another, either without the consent of the owner or by means of fraudulent conduct, practices or representations with the essential element being the intent to deprive the other of what may be taken or misappropriated.
I do not agree with the majority opinion in its holding that a partnership is not “another” in the eyes of the penal statute.
It is elementary in law that a commercial partnership is a fictitious person. It is a civil person possessing the peculiar rights and attributes of a natural person. In con*949templation of law it is a separate legal entity, distinct from the individuals composing it and capable of suing and being sued in the partnership name.
This fundamental law, with reference to commercial partnerships, is stated by us in the Succession of Pilcher, 39 La.Ann. 362, 1 So. 929, 932 as follows:
“In Smith v. McMicken, 3 La.Ann. [319] 322, the court said: ‘The partnership, once formed-and put into action becomes, in contemplation of law, a moral being, distinct from the persons who compose it. It is a civil person which has its peculiar rights and attributes. * * * Hence, therefore, the partners are not the owners of the partnership property. The ideal being, thus recognized by a fiction of law, is the owner; it has the right to control and administer the property to enable it to fulfill its legal duties and obligations; and the respective parties who associated themselves for the purpose of participating in the profits which may accrue, are not owners of the property itself, but of the residuum which may be left from the entire partnership property, after the obligations of the partnership are discharged.’ City of New Orleans v. Gauthreaux, 32 La.Ann. [1126] 1128.”
See also Raymond v. Palmer, 41 La.Ann. 425, 6 So. 692, 17 Am.St.Rep. 398; Sherwood v. His Creditors, 42 La.Ann. 103, 7 So. 79; Darden v. Garrett, 130 La. 998, 58 So. 857; Southwestern Gas & Electric Co. v. Liles, 16 La.App. 500, 133 So. 835.
I respectfully submit that a partnership, being a legal entity and “under our civil law system, unlike that of the common law, * * * is an abstract ideal being with legal relations separate and distinct from those of its individual members; * * * ” (Trappey v. Lumbermen’s Mutual Casualty Co., 229 La. 632, 86 So.2d 515, 516), and is by law endowed with the rights, attributes, privileges and immunities of that which under LSA-R.S. 14:67 is styled “another.”
Under the principles propounded in the above cited cases, all assets of the partnership being owned by the partnership are not owned by the individual partners, and a partnership being a legal civil being with all rights and attributes of others under our law, it is indubitable that a partner may be charged with and held responsible for the theft or misappropriation of the property owned by said partnership. A partner is not deprived of any ownership of property by its illegal taking or other misappropriation by an offending partner; it is the partnership itself, a legal being, which is occassioned the illegal and criminal loss and deprivation.
I respectfully dissent.