58 Miss. 765 | Miss. | 1881
delivered the opinion of the court.
^/Robert H. Edmunds, a young man of handsome estate, be
Edmunds continued to become more and more involved, until his total indebtedness finally amounted to more than $9,000. Suits were eventually brought against him by his various creditors, and in these suits no attention seems to have been paid to any distinction between his debts, as to whether they were contracted before or after majority, or before or after the date of the conveyance to the daughter. It is certain, however, that the debts contracted between his arrival at majority and the date of the conveyance (a period of eight mouths) were trifling. The suits all ripened into judgments, no plea of minority having been interposed in any of them. Under sales made by virtue of these judgments, defendants have held the lands now sued for, during many years. The plaintiff is the daughter of Edmunds, to whom, when she was two months old, he conveyed a life-estate in the property, and she brings this action of ejectment to recover the lands and mesne profits. The conveyance to her is older ■ than the judgments through which defendants claim, but, being voluntary, is fraudulent and void if the holders of the demands against Edmunds for goods furnished during minority were legal creditors at the date of the conveyance. At the
There cannot be said to be any contract in any legitimate sense of the term until after the act of ratification, or until after the written promise under our statute. Before ratification, it is wholly unilateral in its bearing; that is to say, the consideration has been advanced by the adult, but there is no corresponding legal liability upon the minor. It stands, not upon the footing of a debt barred by the Statute of Limitations and afterwards revived by a new promise, because in such a case there has always been an existing, unextinguished right, since limitation affects only the remedy, and not the right; but it is rather like a debt wiped out by a discharge in bankruptcy. In such case there is no existing debt, but there is an outstanding consideration which will support a new contract. This is the illustration used in Hodges v. Hunt, 22 Barb. 151, and in
It follows, from these well-settled principles, that the holders of claims against Edmunds which were for articles, not neces'saries, furnished during minority and not ratified after majority, were not legal creditors at the date of his conveyance, and cannot predicate fraud of it, though it was voluntary.
If defendants can show that the judgments through which they hold embraced, in whole or in part, debts created after the attainment of majority, and before the date of the conveyance, or were in whole or in part for necessaries furnished during minority, under circumstances which imposed a legal liability upon the infant, they can successfully resist plaintiff’s demand, but the burden of doing this rests upon them ; and while there is something to suggest that -debts-contracted after the disability of minority had ceased, and before the execution of the conveyance, may have entered into some of the judgments, this does not clearly appear. The ruling of the court below rendered any such showing upon the part of the defendants unnecessary.
The learned judge, adopting the view that minority was a ■personal privilege, which could not be set up by any one but
• He confounded therein the executed and the executory contracts of infants, and seems to have been partly, at least, led into this error by the course of counsel, who respectively contended, the one, that the making of the deed to the daughter was a disaffirmance of the minority debts, and the other, that it was not. But it is not a question of disaffirmance, but of affirmance. Executed contracts of infants must be disaffirmed or they will become obligatory ; executory contracts must be affirmed or they will be null. Until affirmed, they impose no liability. There was no pretence of affirmance here, and no act of disaffirmance was necessary.
True, when sued, Edmunds failed to plead minority, and judgments went against him. From the rendition of those judgments, and not until then, the claims of the creditors became valid debts against him ; but he had several years before made the conveyance to his daughter, and it was not possible for him, by then making the debts valid, to affect the title previously conveyed. It is well settled that suffering judgment to go upon a debt barred by the Statute ofXimitations will not affect the title to property sold before judgment, and after the bar was complete; and a fortiori must this be true as to minority debts, which have no binding force until judgment.
Whether, the principle would apply, as to the Statute of Limitations, where the conveyance was unsupported by a valuable consideration, we have-not found settled by adjudication ; but certainly it must as to the unratified minority debts of an infant, since as to them there is no legal indebtedness.
Neither the research of counsel nor our own has discovered any adjudicated case similar in its facts or wholly analogous in principle to the one at bar; but we feel satisfied that the general principles controlling the liabilities of infants must lead to the conclusion here reached.
We cannot adopt this view. In the first place, if the debts of the father were valid .debts, this would not be a case of fraud in the conveyance, implied in law from its voluntary character, but rather of a conveyance expressly declared by the grantor to be made with the intention and purpose of defeating his creditors, and it could not, therefore, be upheld by showing a retention, by the debtor, of other property ; and in the second place, if it was a case of fraud presumed by law from the voluntary character of the conveyance, that presumption could not be rebutted by showing the retention of the reversion in the grantor, where all his visible, tangible property is nominally conveyed to another for life, but is really left in his own possession and enjoyment; nor by showing the retention of other property, unless such other property was undoubtedly sufficient to pay all debts, and readily and plainly accessible to the creditors. The property here retained, outside of the reversion, — r which, under the circum-■ stances of this case, must be left out of view, — was evanescent in its character, easily disposable by the debtor, and difficult of being reached by the creditor, if attempted by the debtor to be secreted or sold. It does not come up to the standard laid down in the case of Wilson v. Kohlheim, 46 Miss. 351.
There were two trials of this case in the court below. In
Judgment reversed and new trial directed.