State ex rel. Jennings-Heywood Oil Syndicate v. De Baillon

37 So. 481, 113 La. 572, 1904 La. LEXIS 677
CourtSupreme Court of Louisiana
DecidedOctober 3, 1904
DocketNo. 15,370
StatusPublished
Cited by13 cases

This text of 37 So. 481 (State ex rel. Jennings-Heywood Oil Syndicate v. De Baillon) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Louisiana primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State ex rel. Jennings-Heywood Oil Syndicate v. De Baillon, 37 So. 481, 113 La. 572, 1904 La. LEXIS 677 (La. 1904).

Opinion

PROVOSTY, J.

The Houssiere-Latreille Oil Company brought a possessory action, and coupled with it an injunction to prevent the defendant in the suit, the Jennings-Heywood Oil Syndicate, from trespassing upon or interfering with the property in controversy, a certain 40-acre tract of land described by metes and bounds. The Jennings-Heywood Oil Syndicate answered that it was lawfully in possession of the property under an oil and mineral lease granted by plaintiff’s author, which had been duly recorded before the transfer of the property to plaintiff. The case came to trial, and was decided against plaintiff, and the injunction was dissolved. Plaintiff took a suspensive appeal, which is now pending in this court.

This appeal had the effect of maintaining the injunction in full force. After it had been perfected, the plaintiff drilled an oil well and “brought in’ an oil gusher on the land, and began to appropriate the oil. Thereupon the defendant, the Jennings-Heywood Oil Syndicate, filed a suit in the same court alleging the above facts, and praying that the court ex officio order the judicial sequestration of the oil until the decision of the appealed suit, and the court made an orc^er. accordingly.

The Houssiere-Latreille Company obtained an order for the bonding of the sequestration, and subsequently obtained another order setting aside the sequestration altogether. From the latter order the Jennings-Heywood Oil Syndicate prayed for a suspensive appeal to this court. The judge refused the appeal, and the present application to this court followed, which is a prayer for a mandamus to the judge of the district court commanding him to grant a suspensive appeal from the order setting aside the sequestration.

The reason why our learned Brother refused the appeal was that he thought that, inasmuch as the possessory suit had passed out of his court as an effect of the appeal, and gone to the appellate court, he was without jurisdiction to make any order in it; and -that, therefore, his order for the sequestration, which was a mere incidental order in that suit, had been improvidently granted —coram non judice, and hence that there was nothing for him to do but to set it aside, and refuse to take any steps whatever in the appealed suit.

In thus ruling we think our learned Brother was in error. Very true, by appeal a case is transferred from the trial court to the appellate court (Code Prac. art. 575; Ratliff v. Creditors, 14 La. 292; Barrow v. Clack, 45 La. Ann. 478, 12 South. 631; State ex rel. Ribet v. Judge, 27 La. Ann. 684; State ex rel. Railroad Co. v. Judge, 39 La. Ann. 774, 2 South. 390; State ex rel. Forsyth v. Judge, 42 La. Ann. 1109, 8 South. 305; State ex rel. Silverstein v. Judge, 25 La. Ann. 622; State ex rel. Irwin v. Judge, 36 La. Ann. 192; Graham v. Judge, 24 La, Ann. 598; Williams v. Chew, 6 Mart. [N. S.] 464; State v. Judge, 11 La. Ann. 728; City v. Bilgery, 108 La. 191, 32 South. 429), but this does not mean anything more than that after the appeal has been perfected the trial court cannot interfere with it, or do anything that will in the slightest degree alter or affect the matter submitted to the decision of the appellate court; cannot do-anything to, as it were, take the wind out of the sails of the appellate court. It does not mean that in matters coming up after the appeal, and in no wise involved in it, the trial court cannot make orders clearly necessary to afford a remedy where otherwise there would be none.

That the necessity for this sequestration came up after the appeal had been perfected [575]*575is not deniable. As to there having been any other remedy, no one says that there was; and plainly there was none, since the petitory action cannot be brought pending the possessory (Code Prac. art. 55), and since the appeal bond was for only $150, and was not conditioned for the return of this oil.

But it is said that the effect of the injunction and of the suspensive appeal from the judgment dissolving it was to maintain the possession of plaintiff, and that the sequestration disturbs this possession, and therefore trenches upon the appealed suit.

' The reply is that the sequestration is the act of the court, and that the injunction has no reference to the acts of the court. The defendant was not enjoined from applying to the court for whatever relief the circumstances might call for, and the court was not enjoined from according such relief; hence the injunction is not trenched upon.

Were the court powerless to sequestrate this oil, then our law would be so impotent as not to afford a plain remedy in a plain case. Under the doctrine contended for, if parties are litigating over the possession of a beautiful grove, the pride and glory of a homestead, and the plaintiff has enjoined the defendant as in this ease, and the case has been appealed as in this ease, the plaintiff may through pure vandalism — nay, worse, through mere spite and meanness — proceed to cut down the trees pending the appeal, and the court be powerless to hinder him. The mere statement of such a doctrine is a sufficient refutation of it.

In the eases of Williams v. Duer, 14 La. 531, Fink v. Martin, 10 Rob. 147, and McFarlane v. Richardson, 1 La. Ann. 12, this court recognized the power of the trial court to issue sequestration after appeal.

The learned counsel for the Houssiere-Latreille Company would distinguish those cases on the ground that they involved mortgage rights, and that the Code of Practice, art. 275, makes in favor of mortgage rights an exception to the rule that there cannot be an incidental demand without a principal.

The reasoning of the court in the case of Williams v. Duer does give some countenance to this distinction; but, on the other band,, in the later case of Fink v. Martin, 10 Rob. 147, the court occupied much broader ground. In that case the dissolution of the sequestration was asked because “the judgment rendered by the district court had been appealed from, and all its effects had been suspended by the suspensive appeal.” This court said;

“It is true, as a general rule, that the jurisdiction of the appellate court attaches as soon as the appeal bond is filed; and that the court of the first instance has no longer authority to take any steps in the case, except such as are necessary to transmit the record to the superior court. But as we held in the case first above quoted, we are not ready to decide that the original demand is so entirely and definitively out of the control and jxxrisdiction of the lower court as to preclude the judge thereof from granting any provisional or conservatory order, so .as to secure the ultimate execution of the judgment to be rendered in the appellate court.”

The court added:

“Here the sequestration which was granted had nothing to do with the merits of the principal action. It was a mere conservatory measure which was resorted to to secure the preservation and exercise of the right claimed by the plaintiff in the original suit; and, although an appeal bond was furnished by the defendant and appellant, so as to operate as a suspensive appeal, which bond the judge a quo appears to consider as the only security to which the plaintiff is legally entitled, we are not prepared to say that the appellee should be deprived of his remedy on the property itself, subject to his alleged lien, and that such remedy should not be I'esorted to befox’e exercising his recourse against the surety on said appeal bond, in case the jxxdgment appealed from should be maintained and the order would be executed.

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Bluebook (online)
37 So. 481, 113 La. 572, 1904 La. LEXIS 677, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-ex-rel-jennings-heywood-oil-syndicate-v-de-baillon-la-1904.