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143 Mass. 452

McDonald v. Willis

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

Decided January 24, 1887

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1887-01-24

Petition to enforce a mechanic’s lien. At the trial in the Superior Court, before Mason, J., the petitioner offered a certificate of his account, duly filed in the registry of deeds; but it appeared, from the evidence of the petitioner, that the certificate was sworn to before a magistrate who was at the time the attorney of the petitioner in said matter.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1887-01-24

How this case has been cited

Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently September 1990

1 district · 7 state decisions

30188718901900191019201930194019501960197019801990decided

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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By the Court.

¶1It is true that a man cannot be a judge and an attorney for one of the parties in the same cause. But it has always been the uniform usage for attorneys for either party to administer oaths, as justices of the peace, to their clients or others, when the necessity for voluntary affidavits arises in a case; and there is no sound objection to this where the oaths are voluntary, and the act of the justice is substantially ministerial, and not judicial.

¶2In the case before us, the act of the attorney of the petitioner, in administering to him the oath to his certificate, was *453substantially ministerial, and did not involve or require any hearing, decision, or adjudication. The act of the attorney was no more judicial than the taking an acknowledgment to a deed; and the Superior Court rightly held that the oath was sufficient.

¶3Exceptions overruled.

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