Court Opinion

ID: 8743745
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-26 10:58:43.71517+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:00:32.682280
License: Public Domain

SHELBY, Circuit Judge
(dissenting). The record shows that the plaintiff in error offered to prove by Tom King that, at the time the arrangements were made for the extension of the loan and the execution of the second mortgage, he had an agreement with A. T. Atwater “that the wool should not be included in the second mortgage.” The assignment of error is that the court erred in refusing to permit the witness to testify to an agreement “that the wool already shorn and to be shorn from the sheep should not be included in the second mort-' gage.” The pleadings, the evidence, and the assignment of error seem to me to raise the plain question whether or not the negotiations preceding the execution of the second mortgage can be received in evidence to show that it should have been so written as to release certain property described in the first mortgage. It seems to me that this question should be answered in the negative, and that it would necessarily follow that the circuit court did not err in excluding the evidence. No principle of evidence is better settled than that, when persons put their contracts in writing, it is, in the absence of fraud, accident, or mistake, “conclusively presumed that the whole engagement and the extent and manner of their undertaking was reduced to writing.” Bast v. Bank, 101 U. S. 93, 25 L. Ed. 794, 9 Notes U. S. Rep. 915; Lanes v. Squyres, 45 Tex. 382. I think the judgment should be affirmed.