59 Miss. 3 | Miss. | 1881
delivered the opinion of the court.
It is insisted that the judgment must be reversed because it is against a married woman, and the record nowhere shows that she was the owner of separate property, or that the debt sued on was such as she had the capacity to incur. The suit was instituted in a Justice’s Court, and was without written pleadings. In such a proceeding there would seem to be no appropriate place for the insertion of these facts, except by recitals in the judgment, and they are perhaps rarely found there except in cases prepared by counsel more skilled in the law than justices usually are. Whether a justice’s judgment which omitted them would be held void has not been decided, and does not here arise. The judgment appealed from was rendered in the Circuit Court on appeal, but even when tested by the more stringent rules applicable to the Circuit Court is not void. It is a judgment in personam, general in its character, against a woman; but that she was married only appears by an affidavit filed in the progress of the cause in the Justice’s Court, denying the correctness of the account sued on. In this she is styled the wife of her co-defendant, John Robinson, as to whom the suit was subsequently dismissed. But the affidavit only speaks of her as then being the wife of said Robinson. Whether she was his wife or was married at all at the time of contracting the debt nowhere appears, and cannot be presumed by the court.
If she was single at the date of the contract, her subsequent marriage would in no wise affect her liability ; and therefore if