15 Pa. 113 | Pa. | 1850
The opinion of the court was delivered by
Land is a chattel for payment of debts only when the law has made it a fund for that purpose. It then has undergone a species of conversion, so far as may be necessary to the purpose of • satisfaction, which extinguishes every derivative interest in it which cannot consist with the qualities it has been made to assume. Thus, a judgment, or a mortgage, binds it and converts it; and it is seized as personal property, on a fieri faeias, which commands the sheriff to levy the debt off the defendant’s goods and chattels. We readily comprehénd how a sale on a judgment, a mortgage, or an order of the Orphans’ Court, passes the land freed from dower; but the reason is not so obvious why a sale under a testamentary power, created in good faith, for the benefit of creditors, should do so. It is because the law makes a decedent’s land a fund for payment of his debts, by giving the creditors a lien on it, which might be enforced by judicial process, and would extinguish the widow’s dower in it. It would come to the same thing in the end, and she is consequently not injured by a process substituted by the husband to produce exactly the same result.
Judgment affirmed.