Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Co. v. Luke

• Decision Date: 09 March 1915
• Citation: 220 Mass. 484,108 N.E. 64
• Parties: BOSTON SAFE DEPOSIT & TRUST CO. v. LUKE et al.
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court

220 Mass. 484

108 N.E. 64

BOSTON SAFE DEPOSIT & TRUST CO. v. LUKE et al.

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Suffolk.

March 9, 1915

SYLLABUS

The following is the provision of the will involved:

'I give, devise and bequeath to the Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Company, a corporation duly established under the laws of the commonwealth of Massachusetts and located at Boston, in said commonwealth, the sum of seventy-five thousand dollars in money, but in trust nevertheless, to invest, hold, reinvest and manage the same separate and apart from all other property held by it in trust, and pay over the net income and principal thereof as follows:

'(1) The whole of the net income thereof to be paid my adopted daughter, Fannie Leighton Luke, wife of Otis H. Luke, of said Brookline, during her life quarterly in each and every year together with such portion of the principal of said trust fund as shall make the amount to be paid her at least three thousand dollars a year during her life, said income to be free from the interference or control of her creditors.'

COUNSEL

G. E Kemp, of Boston, for respondent trustee.

Hale Oveson & Kendall and R. H. Oveson, all of Boston, for respondent Luke.

OPINION

LORING J.

The trustee in bankruptcy seeks to take this case out of the decisions of Billings v. Marsh, 153 Mass. 311, 26 N.E. 1000, 10 L. R. A. 764, 25 Am. St. Rep. 635, and Munroe v. Dewey, 176 Mass. 184, 57 N.E. 340, 79 Am. St. Rep. 304, because the bankrupt's equitable life interest in the case at bar was assignable. There is nothing in the will which forbids the life tenant's assigning her equitable life interest. It follows that it was assignable. Ames v. Clarke, 106 Mass. 573; Huntress v. Allen, 195 Mass. 226, 80 N.E. 949, 122 Am. St. Rep. 243.

It is the contention of the trustee in bankruptcy that being assignable the life interest passed to him under section 70a(5) of the Bankrupt Act (Act July 1, 1898, c. 541, 30 Stat. 565 [U. S. Comp. St. 1913, § 9654]), which provides that all 'property which prior to the filing of the petition he [the bankrupt] could by any means have transferred' shall vest in the trustee.

But the immunity of the equitable life interest in the case at bar does not depend upon the kind of property which (by the terms of the Bankrupt Act) passes to the trustee in bankruptcy. The immunity of the equitable life interest goes farther back. It goes back to the fact that this equitable life interest is not subject to bankruptcy proceedings at all. By the terms of the will creating it the equitable life interest here in question...