Hall v. Carney

Decided October 24, 1885

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1885-10-24

Tort for the conversion of a railroad car. Trial in the Superior Court, without a jury, before Barker, J., who allowed a bill of exceptions, in substance as follows: The car in question was, at the time of the alleged conversion, owned by the Grafton Centre Railroad Company, and was then, and for a long time previously had been, part of the rolling stock of that company in actual use on its track, and has ever since remained there.

Cited in Bouvier (1914)’s definition of “Rolling Stock”

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1885-10-24

How this case has been cited

Cited by 7 later decisions — most recently September 1947

4 federal appellate · 3 state decisions

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.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

By the Court.

¶1Railroad cars are, for the purposes of attachment, personal property. Our statutes clearly treat them as such, and provide a special mode of attaching them. Pub. *133Sts. e. 161, §§ 38, 39. In the case at bar, the attachment by the plaintiff was made in exact compliance with the Pub. Sts. c. 161, § 69; and the Superior Court rightly ruled that it was a valid attachment.

¶2Exceptions overruled.

¶3Memorandum.

¶4On the thirteenth day of October, 1885, the Honorable William Sewall Gardner, one of the Justices of the Superior Court, was appointed a Justice of this Court, in place of Mr. Justice Colburn deceased, and took his seat upon the bench on the twentieth day of the same month, at the term of the court then held at Plymouth in the county of Plymouth.