5 Watts 378 | Pa. | 1836
The opinion of the Court was delivered by
The court below, on the trial of this cause, seems to have considered it as a contest between the creditors of Robert Register, or one standing in their shoes and entitled to claim the benefit of the same shield provided for their protection and relief by the statute of 13 Eliz. and the fraudulent grantee of Register; for the president judge in his answer to the plaintiff’s first point admits distinctly that the conveyance, from Register to Foster the plaintiff, is good as between the parties to it, but then in his charge to the jury, he says explicitly, that if the conveyance from Register to Foster was voluntar}', “the subject for their consideration, would be, was it or was it not concocted for the purpose of defeating all or any of the just creditors of the grantor ? If that was the intention of the parties, it was altogether void.” And again, in answer to the plaintiff’s fourth point, he repeats and says, “ the main, I might say the only queslion is, whether the conveyance was intended to delay, hinder, or defraud all or any of the grantor’s creditors. If that was its real design and the facts and circumstances will warrant you to draw this conclusion, notwithstanding.
Seeing then that the statute of 13 Eliz. cannot be made, consistently with the design of it, to protect the defendant, it may be well to see whether the statute of 27 Eliz. can be brought to his aid. If, at the time he bought the land of Register, or even before he paid his money for it, he was apprised, as the evidence would seem to show he was fully, of the previous conveyance of the land by Register to the plaintiff, then, according to the construction put on this latter statute and the principles laid down by this court in Lancaster and Dolan, the defendant has no claim to protection under it as a purchaser. This case was decided after a very able and full discussion of the construction which ought to be given to this statute, and is now considered, as having settled the law on this point, in Pennsylvania. The chief justice, in delivering the opinion of the court in it, shows by a course of reasoning and by language that cannot be resisted or easily forgotten, the injustice and iniquity that would necessarily follow from permitting a voluntary grantor to defeat his own conveyance, by making a subsequent sale of the land, because be is paid for it. He says, 1 Rawle 246, “ It is admitted that a voluntary conveyance is good between the parties; and it is a common principle of equity, that an assignee with notice, must abide by the case of the assignor. But the pretended equity of a subsequent purchaser with notice, even as against a volunteer, would spring from an act, the consequence and design of which would be to enable the donor to cheat the donee. The purchase would be an act of collusion, and all the fraud would be on the side of the purchaser.” If the defendant in the present case had notice of the plaintiff’s conveyance at the time he bought, or before he paid his money, there seems to be no circumstance which he can lay hold of, that would seem to relieve him from the imputation of fraud, which is so clearly shown here by the chief justice, to exist in such case, on the side of the subsequent purchaser. It certainly cannot be considered a sufficient apology and justification for him, having full notice, that he purchased, because the plaintiff had joined with Register, in taking a conveyance from the latter, for the purpose of defrauding his creditors. It is only the party who is likely 1o be injured by such conveyance that can claim to have it annulled; but if he does not cho^e to stir in the matter, why should any other be permitted to interfere? Surely no good can result from it. The peace and well being of the community is not affected by the act, so as to make it a public offence; and therefore, to permit a person who has no concern in the matter, to take the land from the party to whom it has been conveyed by the most solemn, wilful and deliberate act of the owner, and in effect, against the will of the grantee, to give it back in whole, or in part,
Having shown that the interests or rights of the creditors of Register were not concerned in this case, his indebtedness, at the time of making the conveyance to the plaintiff, could not have been material to the issue, and the court, therefore, erred in receiving the evidence tending to prove this fact upon its being objected to by the counsel for the plaintiff. For this cause, as well as the misdirection of the court to the jury, already noticed,
Judgment is reversed, and a venire de novo awarded.