State ex rel. Norman v. Smith

• Decision Date: 31 March 1870
• Parties: STATE ex rel. NORMAN, Relator, v. JOHN W. SMITH et al., Respondents.
• Court: Missouri Supreme Court

46 Mo. 60

STATE ex rel. NORMAN, Relator,

v.JOHN W. SMITH et al., Respondents.

Supreme Court of Missouri.

March Term, 1870.

Petition for mandamus.

Dryden, Lindley & Dryden, and A. D. Mathews, for relator.

I. The County Court, after removing its sittings to the seat of justice, has no discretion that will permit it to hold elsewhere its sittings.

II. The town may be enlarged by additions without affecting the seat of justice. “The place selected by the commissioners” (Wagn. Stat. 396, § 8) “shall be the permanent seat of justice.” How can the place selected be called the permanent seat of justice if it may be changed, as contended here, by the addition of a few lots to the town covering the seat of justice? What pretense is there for saying that railroad addition is the established seat of justice, within the meaning of the statute? (Wagn. Stat. 402, § 1.) The court, in holding its sessions beyond the limits of the established seat of justice, is acting in flagrant violation of the law, and should be required by this proceeding to return to the limits within which it may hold.

Ewing & Holliday, for respondents.

A seat of justice may or may not be incorporated; there is no law requiring this to be done. But if it should be, it may or may not include all or any part of the land acquired for this purpose, or the site of the court-house or other public buildings. The boundaries may be fixed, of course, without reference to any such considerations. It by no means follows, therefore, that because a court-house is not within the original donation, or within the corporate limits, it is not at the seat of justice or at the town of Lebanon. It is only by the name given to the town comprising the seat of justice, that the latter has any distinctive name or distinctive locality. The phrase “at the seat of justice,” as used in the laws, has no signification different from its conventional sense or common acceptation--the same, for instance, in which we are to understand the provisions requiring certain officers to reside “at the seat of government.”WAGNER, Judge, delivered the opinion of the court.

This is an application for a writ of mandamus to compel the justices of the County Court of Laclede county to hold their sittings in the town of Lebanon, the original seat of justice for said county. The petition filed in the first instance conjoined the judge of the Circuit Court holding his court in that county, and also demanded that the County Court should be ordered to proceed to erect certain buildings, etc.; but that was subsequently withdrawn, leaving the proceedings solely against the County Court, as above stated.

It is wholly unnecessary, for the purposes of determining this case, to notice or examine the charges of corruption, combination, or sinister motives which have been made in the pleadings, or to particularly comment on the evidence which has been submitted, as the whole question simply turns upon the power of the County Court, and involves the legal construction of the statute only.

It seems that the county of Laclede was organized by an act of the general assembly of the State of Missouri, entitled “an act to organize the county of Laclede, approved February 24, 1849,” and that, by the provision of the act, commissioners were appointed to locate the seat of justice; that the commissioners, in the discharge of their duties, selected as the seat of justice for said county the tracts or parcels of ground on which the original town of Lebanon was afterwards built. The commissioners received as a donation for said county seat fifty acres of land, and on the first day of October, 1849, made report of their proceedings, accompanied by the deeds and abstracts of title to the land, to the Circuit Court, which court approved the title to the lands, and caused its approval to be entered on the records, and certified to the tribunal transacting county business for the county.

It further appears that in November, 1849, the tribunal transacting county business appointed a commissioner of the seat of justice, and caused the tracts of land so selected as the seat of justice to be laid off in town lots and blocks, and that, in the sale, block numbered two in the tract so laid off was reserved for the purpose of erecting thereon the public buildings of the county; that block...