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108 N.C. 75

12 S.E 892

Albertson v. . Terry

Supreme Court of North Carolina

Decided February 5, 1891

Supreme Court of North Carolina · decided 1891-02-05

MotioN to vacate judgment rendered in Pasquotank Superior Court, heard before Connor, J., on Pall Circuit, 1890. The defendants moved to set aside a judgment obtained against them by the plaintiffs, upon the ground of surprise and excusable neglect. The following are the facts found by the Court below,' and its order thereupon : The Fall Term, 1890, of Pasquotank Court began on Monday, September 15th.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1891-02-05

How this case has been cited

Cited by 7 later decisions — most recently January 1954

5 state decisions

201891190019101920193019401950decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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Merkimon, C. J.

¶1 after stating the case: It is not the province of this Court in this and like cases to review the findings of fact by the Court below. It can only decide upon appeal that the facts found do or do not constitute “mistake, inadvertence, surprise or excusable neglectit cannot go beyond that and decide that the Court ought or ought not to allow or disallow a motion founded upon such cause to set aside a judgment, order or other proceeding, as allowed by the statute (The Code, § 274). This statute vests the discretion to set aside a judgment for such cause in the Judge before whom the motion is made, and his exercise of discretion is not reviewable by this Court. Branch v. Walker, 92 N. C., 87; Foley v. Blank, id., 476.

¶2 It does not appear that the Court refused to allow the motion to set aside the judgment complained of, upon the ground that in no view of the facts could they constitute *78 mistake, surprise, inadvertence or excusable neglect. So far as appears, it may, as it might do, have denied the motion in the exercise of its discretion, in which case this Court could not review its action. The burden is on the appellants to sbow error If they fail to do so, the judgment should be affirmed. The presumption is in favor of its correctness and validity. \

¶3 If the appellants intended to assign as error that the Court based its order upon some particular erroneous ground they should have requested it to specify the ground of its decision, and the Court having done so they should have assigned error in that respect. If the Court had, refused in such case to specify the ground, such refusal would have been erroneous.

¶4 Affirmed.

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