Court Opinion

ID: 9670113
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 03:14:55.899767+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:02.658383
License: Public Domain

Black, J.
(dissenting in part). I would affirm Judge Moynihan’s order as it stands. That order reads:
“Now, therefore, it is ordered and adjudged that said instrument was executed in accordance with PA 1939, No 288, chapter 2, § 5 (CL 1948, §702.5 [Stat Ann 1943 Rev §27.3178 (75)]), and that this judgment be certified by the clerk to the probate court for Wayne county and this cause be remanded to said probate court for further proceedings consistent herewith.”
For the sake of,ever desirable certainty of practice and substantive right, we should keep in constant mind the purely appellate status of the circuit court when questions involving validity of submitted testaments are presented and determined in probate and taken to circuit by appeal or certification. The-jurisdiction of the circuit court in such instance is *106both appellate and special, and no issue may be heard or determined which the court below, on due presentation, has not heard and determined. See cases and discussion in the concurrent opinions Justices Fellows and Wiest prepared for In re Reid’s Estate, 248 Mich 360, 366, 370; followed unanimously in In re Dutton Estate, 347 Mich 186, 192, and by 3 of us in In re Francis Estate, 349 Mich 339, 349.
The only issue so far tried and determined in probate, absent notice of contest and upon testimony ■confined strictly to such issue, is whether the submitted instrument was executed according to sequent requirement that the attesting witnesses actually attest, that is, sign per statute after the intending testator has signed. The probate judge determined that issue adversely to proponent. On appeal to circuit, that issue — and only that issue — was reviewed and determined favorably to proponent. Accordingly, there as yet has been no statutory contest, of such submitted instrument, for want of filing of some formal or informal notice of contest. Such contest may never come to pass, yet the right should not be cut off now. Such was the obvious good sense of the quoted circuit court order; an order which merely puts the status of the submitted instrument back where it was when the erroneous probate order was entered, that is, ready for due hearing of the petition for probate and such notice of statutory contest — say on ground of undue influence or mental incapacity— as may have been filed or may yet be filed prior to the time our decision reaches circuit and that court’s order of remand reaches probate.
Justice Dethmers refers to all this as determination “piecemeal” of the ultimate question; whether the submitted instrument should or should not be admitted to probate. To this I answer that sometimes <our present appellate rules do require “piecemeal” trials. And errors of judges — appellate and sub*107ordinate — do make many other such “piecemeal”' trials, as the profession well knows. Too, less justifiable reasons for “piecemeal” trials occasionally rear themselves. Will we, for instance, employ the epithet “piecemeal trial” when this improvident Court — beset and suffering then as Job — gets around to apply its fancy new rules for separate trials of the many issues a single action or proceeding inevitably presents? Why, this Utley Estate will have seen nothing in comparison with what’s fast a'comin’ — for Michigan lawyers and judges — in future cases of many trials.
To summarize: The controlling fact is that the probate court so far has limited its decision .to this; that the ordered mechanics of the statute (CL 1948, § 702.5 [Stat Ann 1943 Rev § 27.3178(75)]) were not followed. That decision was error, as the circuit court properly determined. Not decided to date are remaining issues the probate'court — not this Court or the circuit court — must hear and determine as a condition of grant or denial of the yet pending petition for probate. The submitted instrument h.as not as yet “passed the ordeal of probate” (see quotation below). That ordeal must be suffered originally in the probate court. The instrument thus is not, to date, a legal testament. It cannot now be pronounced such by this Court, any more than the circuit court could so pronounce. The point was made in Allison v. Smith, 16 Mich 405, 429:
“Whenever the paper propounded as a will has been-subjected to every kind and.degr.ee of proof on probate which could be necessary according to its provisions, and been regularly adjudicated upon, its character as a testamentary instrument is fixed; whatever construction should be subsequently put upon its provisions, and whatever decision should be thereafter made upon the capacity of any donee to take. Until the requisite adjudication upon probate, *108the instrument, insofar as such adjudication should be wanting, would remain incomplete as an adjudged testamentary paper, and without any fixed legal value as a will. Insofar as it should remain unproved, it could not have the full operation of a will. The fact of its being unproved would not render it void.
“But it could not be told whether it was void or not, until it should have passed the ordeal of probate.” ’
As indicated, I vote to affirm.
Kavanagh, J., concurred with Black, J.
Otis M. Smith, J., did not sit.