Court Opinion

ID: 9829173
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 19:02:47.324606+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:42:57.888808
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
Appellant in his motion reiterates his contention that R.S. Articles 5024 to 5033, inclusive, impose assessment liability on the subscribers at the reciprocal exchange here involved. Without extended discussion, this court is constrained to adhere to its former opinion holding to the contrary.
Since that opinion was handed down on March 16 of 1944, the Austin Court of Civil Appeals, in Richardson et al., Appellants, v. Kelly, Receiver (Herbert Marshall, Successor), Appellee, 179 S.W.2d 991, refused to set aside a prior judgment of the trial court in that cause holding the subscribers subject to an assessment liability in that instance.
The Richardson case, however, was a bill of review proceeding to set aside an assessment judgment, after the term at which it had been rendered had expired; hence, at base, it involved structurally different issues from those presented in this cause.
Moreover, the opinion discloses that the powers of attorney, or contracts, for reciprocal insurance there under review were also materially dissimilar to those presented by this cause; wherefore, upon the whole, nothing in conflict with this court’s former conclusions in this cause, stemming from facts not in legal effect different from those here obtaining as to what the contracts and the acts of the parties under them were, has been made to appear.
Indeed, as its original opinion discloses, the powers of attorney, which were filed with and approved by the Board of Insurance Commissioners of Texas, which constituted the contracts here, were exclusively used during the insolvency period, and they contained contractual limitations against the assessment liability claimed.
Both the cause at this bar and the Richardson cause were decided by the same trial court — the 98th District Court of Travis County- — and that court evidently perceived no conflict between this holding in the one that assessment liability was imposed, while in the other that it was not — presumably upon the same conclusion this court now reaches, that the underlying facts required such differing determinations.
Unconvinced of error in the former judgment, the motion for rehearing will be refused.
Motion refused.