262 Mo. 377 | Mo. | 1914
Plaintiff sued in equity in the St. Louis Circuit Court. The object and general nature of his bill was to procure a decree in his favor, as Iowa guardian, requiring Troll, the Missouri guardian, to make a final settlement of his, accounts, and pay over the balance in his hands, that is, transfer the estate, and for general relief — the bill counting on the theory that the ward resided in Iowa; was adjudged insane and confined in an asylum there; that plaintiff is the primary or domiciliary guardian, and defendant the ancillary guardian; that the purposes of the Missouri guardianship have been fully subserved and to continue it would subject the estate of the ward to the wasting burden of double costs and expense.
The case was tried in a notably unconventional way, on an agreed statement of facts, in substance as follows:
On such agreed facts, the court found for defendant and plaintiff appealed on due steps to the St. Louis Court of Appeals. That court, on its own motion, transferred the case to this court on the theory “the amount in dispute” exceeds $7500 exclusive of costs,
That our ruling on the motion to retransfer was improvidently made will appear from the following premises: In the case at bar neither plaintiff nor defendant claim to own the fund in their own right. Contra, both plaintiff and defendant concede it belongs to and constitutes practically the corpus of the estate of their unfortunate ward. Both of them, therefore, are but trustees. She is the beneficiary and the dispute is not over her right to the fund, but it is over their respective rights to the custody of it while it is being used under the supervision of the probate court for its true beneficial owner. So, plaintiff does not ask a money judgment against defendant to be enforced by fi. fa. He invokes merely the power of a .chancellor to do the following thing, to-wit, to coerce a final settlement in the proper probate court of the ancillary guardianship with the ultimate view and pur
*382 “In the case at bar the record fails to show what value, if any, attaches to the defendant’s position as trustee, but it does appear that the duration of that office, if it may be so called, is for life, and invests him, as far as these plaintiffs are concerned, with the partial control of property of the value of two hundred thousand dollars or more, of which he is to be deprived by this proceeding, and we are not prepared to say, unconditionally, that this is a case where the amount in dispute does not exceed twenty-five hundred dollars.” [42 Mo. App. l. c. 515.]
In Gast Bank Note & L. Co. v. Fennimore Assn., 147 Mo. 557, an injunction suit in which there was no allegation in the bill to determine the value in money of relief to plaintiff, it was ruled we had no jurisdiction. This ruling was put in part on a pronouncement made by the Court of Appeals in Brick Co. v. St. Louis Smelting & Ref. Co., 48 Mo. App. 635, reading:
“When the object of the suit is not to obtain a money judgment, but other relief [in this case an injunction], the amount involved must be determined by the value in money of the relief to the plaintiff, or of the loss to the defendant, should the relief be granted, or vice versa, should the relief be denied. If either is necessarily in excess of the sum within the appellate jurisdiction of this court, then the Supreme Court has exclusive cognizance of the appeal.”
To like effect is Clothing Co. v. Watson, 168 Mo. l. c. 143; and in a very late quo warranto case, State ex rel. Union Elec. Light & Power Co. v. Reynolds et al., Judges, 256 Mo. 710, the learning on the point was reviewed in extenso by our Brother Graves in Banc. In that case we drew to ourselves jurisdiction because the value of the right necessarily involved, estimated in money, self-evidently gave us jurisdiction. We will not swell this opinion by quoting from so late a case. The student with a prying mind may consult it with profit. We dismiss it with the observation that the
Turning, now, to the present record, the money value of the right to administer Mrs. Wilson’s estate, which is the only thing Troll stands to lose or win, hence is the “amount in dispute,” in a jurisdictional sense, certainly cannot equal $7500; nnle.ss, more’s the pity (to borrow the wry conceit of a barrister in another case at our bar) we take the letters of guardianship as in the nature of a warranty deed to the whole or the lion’s share of the estate of the ward — a thing we are not willing to do, nor is it asked at our hands.
This court has neither a disposition to yearn after jurisdiction and give teeth to such yearning by reaching out and grasping it on unsubstantial grounds, nor does it shirk a jurisdiction rightfully belonging here. As final arbiter it takes and gives ungrudgingly as the facts warrant and the law directs; and in this case we are of opinion we have no jurisdiction unless other questions besides the amount in dispute give it to us. We have searched the record with an eye to that fact
The premises all in mind, the cause is retransferred to the St. Louis Court of Appeals. It is so ordered.