Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 75, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 March 1910 — LEGAL INFORMATION [ARTICLE]

LEGAL INFORMATION

The Louisiana Code provides that if a donee has attempted to take the life of the donor, or if he has been guilty toward him of cruel treatment, crimes or grievous injuries, the gift will be considered revoked. In Grandchamp v. Administrator of Succession of Billis, 49 Southern Reporter, 998, it appeared that Billis had conveyed property to his wife, who later had reconveyed it to him. The conjugal association to have been stormy, concluding - ln the assassination by Billis -of his wife while she was fleeing from his house and his suicide on the same night. This wife’s heirs .contended that ingratitude sufficient to annul the reconveyance by the wife had been demonstrated by the husband. The Louisiana Supreme Court held that the death of the donee extinguished the action, because the revocation is a penalty which can be pronounced only against ths guilty. Even when the donee dies immediately upon the commission of the offense, this rule applies. The law having made no exception, the courts can make none. It was not intended to visit the sins of the donee upon the helrk-at law. Tor the merciless broadsides of unconstltutionality, the Federal Employers’ Liability Act, created to decrease the number of railroad fatalities, succumbed in Hoxie v. New York, N. H. A H. R. Co., 73 Atlantic Reporter, 754. The Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors criticised as and violative of the long-accepted common law the provision allowing employes to recover for injuries received through the negligence of fellow servants. The prohibition against railroads exempting themselves from liability for negligence by contract with their employes was deemed violative of the fifth amendment of the Federal Constitution, prohibiting the deprivation of liberty and property without due process of law, ln that it denied the parties the right to contract. Arbi, trarily making railroads while engaged in interstate commerce liable to employes for Injuries was considered invalid, except as a regulation of Interstate commerce, It not being sufficient that it remotely affected such commerce if that result was secured by invading the settled limits of the sovereignty of the States as to their own Internal police. The section providing for the distribution of the fund recovered in an action for death was assailed thus: If the damages recoverable are to be treated as representing the estate left by the decedent, it is for the State of his domicile to regulate the distribution thereof, afid, if the damages are treated as a fund created by the act, Congrees may not bring Jnto existence a new duty of executors or administrators to collect and a new duty of masters to pay what the decedent never owned.