Court Opinion

ID: 9808976
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 20:57:08.755618+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:23:11.800773
License: Public Domain

Clark, C. J.,
dissenting: The assessments are not for any particular loss, but to raise a fund to pay operating expenses and losses as they may occur. If a policy holder should die and payment be refused, surely his personal representative could attach this or any other property of the defendant which he might find in this State. He should not be driven to a distant forum to battle with the company in the courts of the State of its origin. This fund has not been segregated and applied to any one loss. The assessments are held in trust, it is true, to pay losses which may accrue, just as premiums are so held by “old line” companies. But in both cases the money is the property of the company (Bragaw v. Supreme Lodge, 128 N. C., 354), its general assets, and may be attached here and held to abide the judgment of our courts in payment of a death loss, whose payment out of the fund has been refused, or to pay a claim like the plaintiff’s, which is in lieu of a death loss, being to recover back assessments paid into the fund by him by reason of the wrongful cancellation of his policy, or breach of contract under which he paid in said premiums. It is a trust fund for the payment of losses; it is necessarily a trust fund for the repayment of anything which has been paid into the fund by the plaintiff under an agreement which has been wrongfully repudiated by the defendant.