Court Opinion

ID: 9640659
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 17:11:18.91324+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:31.628310
License: Public Domain

PARKER., Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
The congregation of the High Street Baptist Church was not a corporation. It had never been incorporated, and -the Constitution of Virginia forbade its incorporation. The notes executed by the defendants as trustees for the congregation were therefore contracts executed in behalf of an unincorporated religious association. They were binding upon such members of the association as authorized their execution, and certainly upon the defendants, whose assent was evidenced by the fact that they themselves executed the notes. Catlett v. Hawthorne, 157 Va. 372, 161 S. E. 47; Clark v. O’Rourke, 111 Mich. 108, 69 N. W. 147, 66 Am. St. Rep. 389; Medlin v. Ebenezer Methodist Church, 132 S. C. 498, 129 S. E. 830, 831; Williston on Contracts, vol. 1, p. 586, § 309; 23 R. C. L. 432; 5 C. J. 1351; 54 C. J. 31; notes 7 A. L. R. 222, 41 A. L. R. 754, and cases there cited.
And there is nothing in section 5580' of the Virginia Code which relieves defendants of this liability. Their signatures appear upon the notes, as does also the name of the unincorporated association for which they were acting as trustees and in whose behalf the notes were executed. The designation of the signers of the notes as trustees of the congregation cannot be used to relieve defendants from liability on the ground that it discloses that they were acting as agents 'for a disclosed principal and at the same time be ignored as disclosing the principal for which they were acting.
And I cannot see that the liability of defendants is in anywise affected by section 6058 of the Virginia Code, permitting suits against unincorporated associations. As said by the late Judge Cothran in Medlin v. Ebenezer Methodist Church, supra, in dealing ■with a similar statute, “an unincorporated association is in no sense a legal entity and is not made so. by the statute. * * * The liability of the members is joint and several. 5 C. J. 1362. Any individual member may therefore be sued without proceeding under the statute against the association.”
Nor is the liability of members of an unincorporated association affected by the decision of the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia in Cain v. Rea, 1591 Va. 446, 166 S. E. 478. The effect of that decision was merely to sustain a mechanic’s lien under the Virginia statute where improvements were made on church property under a contract authorized by the congregation. Nothing is said in the case which militates against the well-settled rule that the members of an unincorporated association who give their assent to contracts entered into in its behalf are personally liable thereon.