Court Opinion

ID: 9828436
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 18:22:12.690362+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:42:48.082606
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
Appellant presents a motion for rehear-in which it is vigorously insisted that the decree of divorce is conclusive that Sallie V. Sikes was at the time sane, and that therefore the judgment in its legal effect amounts to a ratification of the note and trust deed declared upon in appellant’s petition. It is true that the act of the Thirty-Third Legislature, approved April 1, 1913 (see Regular Session, p. 183 [Vernon’s Sayles’ Ann. Oiv. St. 1914, art. 4632], amending article 4632 of the Revised Statutes of 1911), provides that it shall not apply in any case where either the husband or wife is insane, and in construing the act the Dallas Court of Civil Appeals, in the ease of Skeen v. Skeen, 190 S. 'W'. 1118, held that the district court was not *614authorized to grant a decree of divorce where it appeared that the plaintiff was insane. But appellant was in no sense a party or privy to the decree of divorce under consideration in this case, and in such cases, however well established to the contrary it may be between parties and privies to a judgment, the decree is not conclusive. See Freeman on Judgments, §§ 154-159; Bertrand v. Bingham’s Adm’x, 13 Tex. 266, 267. On this subject we know of ño clearer statement than that given by Judge Wheeler in the jast-cited case. He says:
“There is and can be no controversy as to the rule of law invoked by the defendant; that is, that a matter once litigated and determined by competent authority cannot a second time be brought in controversy between the same parties. In the concise and perspicuous language of Lord Chief Justice De Grey in the Duchess of Kingston’s Case, so universally quoted with approbation: ‘The judgment of.a court of concurrent jurisdiction, directly upon the point, is, as a plea, a bar; or as evidence, conclusive, between the same parties, upon the same matter, directly in question in another court.’ But to give a judgment such effect, it is an essential element in the rule that there be an identity of parties. For it is a principle, universally acknowledged, that no one can, in general, be bound by a judgment, unless he be a party to the suit, or be in privity with the party. 1 Stark. Ev. 217n. ‘It is,’ says Starkie, ‘a general rule that a verdict shall not be used as evidence against'a man where the opposite verdict would not have been evidence for him; in other words, the benefit to be derived from the verdict must be mutual. This,’ he adds, ‘seems to be no more tbian a branch of the former rule, that to make the judgment conclusive evidence the. parties must be the same; for then the benefit and prejudice would be mutual and reciprocal.’ Id. 220. ‘Both the litigants must be alike concluded, or the proceedings cannot be set up as conclusive upon either.’ ”
It may fee suggested, that a decree of divorce is a decree in rem, and therefore in accord with a well-established line of authorities, binding upon all the world. In a sense this may be true. The decree may well be said as against all the world to establish the marital status of the parties. But we do not think the decree is one in rem in so far as it disposes of property rights between the parties. This distinction was observed in the decision of the Dallas Court of Civil Appeals cited above. For in that case, while the power of the court to grant a decree of divorce was denied, the power of the court to dispose of property rights between the husband and wife was distinctly upheld. If, therefore, it he conceded that the judgment of divorce under consideration is conclusive as to every issue involved therein, including the issue of insanity as between Sallie Y. Sikes and her husband, J. B. Sikes, it is not so as between appellant and the legal representative of Sallie Y. Sikes in the present suit, at least, in so far as the decree operates upon the rights of the parties to the property.
We conclude that the motion for rehearing should he overruled.