Woodbridge v. Jones
| Decision Date | 18 June 1903 |
| Citation | 183 Mass. 549,67 N.E. 878 |
| Parties | WOODBRIDGE et al. v. JONES et al. |
| Court | United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court |
Wm. H. Niles and E. M. Stevens, for petitioners.
Walter B. Grant, for defendant Dora S. Jones.
Alden P White and Guy C. Richards, for defendant Jas. F. Twiss and others.
Before proceeding to the consideration of this case, we desire to comment upon the form of the report. The report calls for the interpretation of a clause in a will. In such a case, for reasons too obvious to be stated, not only the clause itself but the whole will, should be placed before us; and, where that is not done, we cannot be entirely free from apprehension that something which, if placed before us, would have thrown light upon the question involved, may have been omitted, and, in a close case, that the thing omitted might have led us to a different conclusion. In the report before us, no part of the will is contained in the report, except the clause upon which the question before us has arisen, and we therefore enter upon the consideration of it with reluctance.
The clause is as follows: 'I devise and bequeath all the rest and residue of my estate, both real and personal, to my wife Sarepta Twiss, during her life, to use and dispose of the same as she may think proper, with remainder thereof on her decease, one-third to the heirs of my brother Isaac Twiss onethird to the heirs of my brother John G. Twiss, and the balance to Dora S. Jones above mentioned.' And the question is whether the life tenant had the power to dispose of any portion of the real estate in fee. It is a narrow and difficult question. If the writer of this will had studied the decisions made in this state and elsewhere, with a view to frame a clause which in that respect should be as ambiguous and obscure as possible, it is doubtful if he could have selected language more appropriate for his purpose than that which he actually used. As to a student in geometry it sometimes happens that a solid angle in a particular figure before him will seem at one moment to point up, and at another moment down, so the interpretation of this clause seems to change according as emphasis is placed on the word 'dispose,' on the one hand, or on the technical meaning of the word 'remainder,' on the other. On the one hand, it is urged that by the express language of the will there is devised to the wife a life estate only, with the remainder to the other devisees named in the clause; that the word 'remainder' is used in its proper technical sense, namely, as describing an estate limited to take effect and to be enjoyed after the determination of another estate which is created with it, and that in this case the previous estate is a life estate; that, if the testator had meant by the word to indicate only such property as remained undisposed of at the decease of the life tenant, he would have avoided this technical word, and would have used some such phrase as 'whatever remains'; that, as against the technical meaning of the word 'remainder,' the testator, by the phrase 'to use and dispose of the same as she may think proper,' meant simply to emphasize in express language the powers over the property which are conferred by law upon the life tenant as such, just as sometimes similar language following a devise in fee has been held to describe expressly only what the law would have implied, and therefore to be of no real legal effect. See Veeder v. Meader, 157 Mass. 413, 32 N.E. 358. On the other hand, it is urged that the word 'dispose' is broad enough to include a conveyance in fee, and that to limit its operation to only such power as the law gives to a life tenant strictly as such is to give to it no meaning at all; that the word 'same' clearly refers to the property itself, and not merely to the...
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