64 Vt. 544 | Vt. | 1892
The opinion of the court was delivered by
It is not the policy of the law to invalidate a list on account of errors when the listers have acted in good faith and the errors prove harmless. It seems that upon the refusal of the plaintiff to pay the tax assessed upon the list of 33. IT. Adams and wife her property was taken by the collector of taxes upon the tax warrant, so that the error in inserting the names of both husband and wife in the grand list, as the owners of the property, worked no harm.
“ When statutes direct certain proceedings to be done in a certain way or at a certain time, and a strict compliance with these provisions of time and form does not appear essential to the judicial niind|the proceedings are held valid,! though the command of the statute is disregarded or disobeyed. In these cases by a somewhat singular use of language, the statute is said to be directory. In other cases the statute is held to be imperative or mandatory.” Sedg. on Stat. and Cons. Law, 368.
This statute imposes no penalty upon the clerks of school districts for non-compliance with its requirements. It does not declare that school meetings shall be illegal and their proceedings void if held without such a record of the warning. Then what was the real purpose of its enactment ?
It is an established rule in the exposition of statutes that the intention of the lawgiver is to be deduced from a view of the whole and of every part of a statute, taken and compared to
R. L. 521 requires that notices for school meetings shall specify the business to be transacted or questions to be considered at the meeting. The notice or warning is thus made by law the foundation- for all the proceedings at the meeting held under it. Sherwin v. Bugbee, 17 Vt. 337. In the light of the importance of warnings for the different kinds of meetings named in the Act of 1888, the' intent of the legislature is easily discoverable, which is that If the warning should be lost or destroyed the record of it might be produced and the meeting held under it. The purpose obviously was not to ju’event meetings being held by towns, school districts and othér .municipal corporations named in the act, but to guard against a possible failure of such meetings through a loss of the warning therefor. It can hardly be conceived that the legislature intended that if a town meeting were held for the voters to exercise their right of suffrage in the choice of presidential electors, that the meeting must be declared illegal because the town clerk, through accident, ignorance or design, had omitted to record the warning. As was said by a learned jurist: “ A strict and literal adherence to the letter and form of a statute in minor or non-essential particulars, will often defeat a remedy, qr destroy a right which it was the principal intention of the legislature to create or provide.”
Judgment reversed and cause remanded.