Court Opinion

ID: 7986939
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-09-09 01:26:42.366549+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:35:13.652297
License: Public Domain

Campbell, J.,
delivered the opinion of the court.
There is no dissent in the books from the proposition that one who is active in preventing a testator from making an intended provision by his will for another, and where, but for such intervention, the intended provision would have been made, will be held to be a trustee of any devise to himself, to the extent it would have *98been for such other, if it had not been intercepted by him, and will be compelled to respond to the claim of the intended beneficiary. Intercepting a bounty intended for another, and diverting it to one’s self, is held to be a fraud, from which a trust arises by operation of law, and not within the statute of frauds or wills, but expressly excepted.
The facts stated in the bill show that the testator, who had procured a codicil to be prepared to change the devise made wholly to the appellant, so as to include the appellee as a sharer of the devise, was induced by representations and assui’ances of the appellant to forego and abandon his purpose to execute the codicil to effect the purposed change in the will, which was left as written because of such representations and assurances. Out of this transaction a trust arises by operation of law, because the testator was influenced with respect to his will, and an intended beneficiary was prevented from receiving .the benefit which, but for the intervention stated, would have been secured to him by the act of the testator.
We would not be understood as sanctioning the doctrine that an enforceable trust will arise from the mere breach of an oral promise, however solemn, to hold land in trust. There must be conduct influential in producing the result, and but for which such result would not have occurred, amounting, in the view of a court of equity, to fraud, to save the case from the statute of frauds. A merely oral promise, and its subsequent breach, however disappointing and harmful, and though ever so reprehensible in morals, is not of itself enough to cause a court of chancery to declare a trust.

Affirmed, and thirty days given for answer after mandate filed in the court below.