Cook v. Cook

• Decision Date: 16 November 1951
• Citation: 243 S.W.2d 900
• Parties: COOK v. COOK.
• Court: United States State Supreme Court — District of Kentucky

Page 900

243 S.W.2d 900

COOK v. COOK.

Court of Appeals of Kentucky.

Nov. 16, 1951.

Lawrence S. Grauman, David G. Cates, Louisville, for appellant.

William A. Coffee, Miles R. Thacker, Louisville, for appellee.

MILLIKEN, Judge.

Agnes Waldsmith Cook has appealed from a judgment which annulled her 1930 ceremonial marriage in Indiana to George W. Cook. Her husband had sought the annulment on the ground that he was not mentally competent in 1930 to contract the marriage. Mrs. Cook denied his allegations, counterclaimed for a divorce from bed and board and asked that certain real estate which she and the plaintiff had purchased be restored to her.

In 1926 Mr. Cook had been found incompetent to handle his own affairs and was treated for a short time at the Veterans Hospital, Marion, Indiana, then was released to return to his mother's home. After his marriage to appellant, the couple led a normal life according to the testimony of a neighbor of several years, although the husband had no employment. In fact, in 1934 Cook was restored as a person of sound mind by order of the Jefferson Circuit Court, and drew his own compensation from the Veterans Bureau until he again was declared incompetent in 1936. For the next twelve years he was an inmate of the Veterans Hospital at Lexington, Kentucky, where his wife visited him until advised not to do so by a Veterans Administration official. Mrs. Cook worked steadily throughout the marriage.

The lex loci contractus governs and determines the validity of the marriage, and if valid where consummated it must be held valid everywhere. Leonard v. Braswell, 1896, 99 Ky. 528, 36 S.W. 684, 36 L.R.A. 707; Johnson v. Sands, 1932, 245 Ky. 529, 53 S.W.2d 929; 35 Am.Jur. 284. Consequently, the Indiana law, Section 44-104 of Burns' Annotated Statutes, governs the question of the validity of the marriage, and reads:

'The following marriages are declared void: * * *

'Third. When either party is insane or idiotic at the time of such marriage.'

In construing this statute the Indiana Court has held, in Castor v. Davis, 120 Ind. 231, 22 N.E. 110, 111, that a ceremonial marriage consummated three years after the husband had been adjudged insane and three years before his guardian was discharged, when followed by years of apparently normal married life, clearly overcame the presumption of insanity which originated in the adjudication three years before the marriage and which was never removed by an adjudication of sanity. The Indiana Court commented: 'Whatever the presumption arising from the record made in 1840 (the date of the adjudication of insanity) may be when applied to ordinary contracts, we do not think it should be permitted to overcome the presumption in favor of the legality of a marriage where the parties lived together as husband and wife for more than a quarter of a century. Marriage is something more than an ordinary contract affecting the property rights of the parties. It is an institution in which the public have an interest'.

It will thus be seen that the Indiana Court, in Castor v. Davis, based its opinion on the validity of the allegedly void ceremonial marriage and not upon the basis of a common law marriage which is legal in Indiana. In Langdon v. Langdon, 204 Ind. 321, 183 N.E. 400, 85 A.L.R. 1297, it was found that a common law marriage had been created by the parties to supplant a void ceremonial marriage. In the Langdon opinion the Indiana Court inadvertently so described the situation in Castor v. Davis, but a close reading of the opinion in the latter case proves otherwise. We agree, of course, with appellee's reasoning that no common law marriage could arise in Kentucky, where such marriages are not recognized, and thus could...