56 S.C. 119 | S.C. | 1899
The opinion of the Court was
delivered by
Sc far as we are informed, we have no authority in this State upon the question which we are called upon to decide. The case of Wallace v. Graham, 13 Rich., 322, cited by counsel for respondent, is not in point, for it does not appear in that case that the judgments there in question were recovered before the interest of'the judgment debtor was acquired; and certainly the question presented in this case was not considered or even alluded to.
The authorities elsewhere, with practical unanimity, sustain the view which we have adopted. In 1 Black on Judgts., sec. 460, it is said: “If several judgments rendered and entered against the same defendant at different times, and he afterwards acquires the legal title to real estate, the liens of the several judgments attach tog-ether upon the property at the same instant, and all stand upon the same footing, and the oldest judgment has no priority. This general rule is accepted in all the States, so far as we have been able to discover, except Oregon;” and even that can scarcely be regarded as an exception, as we shall presently show, as the decision there turned upon the phraseology of the statute there. The cases cited by Black to sustain his text are Relfe v. McComb, 2 Head. Tenn., 558; 75 Am. Dec., 748; Michael v. Boyd, 1 Ind., 100; Moody v. Harper, 25 Miss., 484, Cayce v. Stovall, 50 Miss., 396, and Davis v. Benton, 2 Sneed (Tenn.), 665. An examination of these cases shows that the cases of Relfe v. McComb and Cayce v: Stovall are directly in point, and the other cases', though not precisely in point, recognize the principle upon'which the doctrine of the text rests. In the case of Moody v. Harper, which arose under the statute of 1824 of Mississippi, the Court based its decision upon the ground that a lien cannot exist until there is property to which it can attach, saying: “It is certainly true that a prior lien is entitled to a prior