Court Opinion

ID: 9832144
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 21:39:56.715243+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:43:42.805989
License: Public Domain

On Appellants’ Motion for Rehearing.
In our main opinion in this case heretofore filed we erred in stating that the validating act of 1871, quoted in said opinion, was repealed by being omitted from the Revised Statutes of 1895. We were led into this error by the note in Sayles’ Civil Statutes, cited in the opinion. Section 4 of the act adopting the Revised Civil Statutes of 1895 (Rev. St. 1895, p. 1103) provides “that all civil statutes of a general nature, in force when the Revised Statutes take effect, and which are not included herein, or which are not expressly continued ip. force, are hereby repealed.” Under this provision the validating or curative act before mentioned would be repealed, but section 7 of the act adopting the Revised Statutes exempts validating acts from the operation of section 4, before quoted. Section 7 is as follows: “That no general or special law heretofore enacted validating or legalizing the acts or omissions of any officer, or any act or proceeding whatever, shall be affected by the repealing clause of this title; but all such validating or legalizing statutes whatsoever now in force in this state are hereby continued in force, and the same shall be as effectual for all purposes after as before the Revised Statutes go into effect.” Under this provision, which is also contained in the act adopting the Revised Statutes of 1911, it is clear that the validating act of April, 1871, which provides that “all surveys properly made by virtue of genuine or valid land certificates, which surveys, together with the certificates by virtue of which they were made, have been returned and are not on file in the General Land Office and not in conflict with any valid land claim, shall be deemed valid and the Commissioner of the General Land Office is hereby authorized and required to issue patents for the same,” is still in force. The evident p.urpose and intent of the Legislature in the enactment of section 7 above quoted was to preserve unimpaired any rights which might have accrued to any person under the provisions of any validating act in force at the time the Revised Statutes took effect, and the statement in our former opinion that appellants cannot assert any rights under said act is incorrect, and is withdrawn.
This being so, it is necessary for us to determine whether said validating' act had the effect of legalizing a location on public lands, made at a time when the laws authorizing such location were suspended. As stated in our former opinion, the question is not free from doubt. The clause “all surveys properly made” must be held to only mean .all surveys accurately or properly made as to running and locating the lines of the survey and their designation in the field notes, if the act is made to apply to a location not authorized to be made by law. On the other hand, if the survey was “properly made” in the sense that it was made in accordance with law, it can plausibly be contended that no validating act was - necessary, as any discrepancies in the location of its lines or in the field notes returned to the Land Office might, under the law, have been corrected, and therefore the Legislature in the passage of said act was *53engaged in a wholly unnecessary and useless task.
In tlie ease of Adams v. Ry. Co., 70 Tex. 252, 7 S. W. 729, our Supreme Court, in an exhaustive opinion by Justice Stayton, construes this and other acts regulating the location and survey of public lands and, as we understand the opinion, reaches the conclusion that the purpose of this act was to validate locations in which the surveys had not been made and the field notes returned to the Land Office within the time fixed by previous statutes. In other words, the purpose was to prevent the forfeiture of a right legally acquired, and not to validate an unauthorized attempt to acquire a right. This being the purpose of the act, we think the clause “locations properly made” should be construed to mean locations made by authority of law, and the act would not validate a location made without any legal authorization, or at a time when the laws authorizing such locations were suspended.
With this correction and addition we adhere to the views expressed in our former opinion and the motion for rehearing is overruled.