10 Watts 101 | Pa. | 1840
The opinion of the court was delivered by
That a judgment shall not be reversed in a collateral proceeding for any thing but collusion, is a principle, which perhaps, has not án exception; nor, standing on the public records, shall it be deemed a nullity, provided, the magistrate had jurisdiction of the matter adjudicated. Thus, it was held in Martin v. Rex, 6 Serg. & Rawle 296, that a second judgment on a warrant of attorney, which had been exhausted by the entry of a judgment on it in another county, is not void, though it was admitted to- be irregular. And in King v. King, 1 Penn. Rep. 191, inquiry into the validity of the original judgment, was made on the trial of a scire facias, only by permission of the opposite party. In Feger v. Kroh, a judgment entered on warrant of attorney before a justice of the peace, and docketed in the common pleas for purposes of lien, was inadvertently said to be void; but that it was only erroneous, is shown by the fact, that it was reversed, which would have been unnecessary, had it been a nullity, and also by the fact, that the purchaser at sheriffs sale, was held to be protected by the statute. Now the statute has regard to judgments which, though erroneous, “ shall warrant the awarding of said writs of execution,” but not to those which are already void. For though an erroneous judgment may warrant an execution, a void one may not; it is in contemplation of law, no judgment at all. The error in that case, being the want of a'summons or an appearance, the purchaser was protected, because the judgment had sustained the execution; and it was only thus, that he was brought within the words of the statute: besides, whether the judgment were void or not, was not the question decided. In the similar case of Alberti v. Dawson, 6 Binney 106, the judgment was said not to be void but irregular; and even that was said evidently without regard to the distinction taken by chief justice De Grey, betwixt things erroneous and things irregular — a distinction I have never been able to comprehend; for though what is erroneous, must be irregular, it would seem not to follow, that what is irregular must be a nullity. From Braddee v. Brownfield, 4 Watts 474, in which it was said, that a judgment on warrant of attorney, can not be proved to have been stillborn by evidence of previous satisfaction of the debt, it is to be inferred, that a judgment standing on the docket of the common pleas, must be treated as an existing one, however erroneous it may appear to
Judgment affirmed.