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19 Ill. 68

Forquer v. Forquer

Illinois Supreme Court

Decided November 15, 1857

Illinois Supreme Court · decided 1857-11-15

<p>Tlie Circuit Court can correct a clerical error, made in copying a decree, by supplying an omission, which was evident from the minutes of the court; but if it does not appear that it was the intention of the court to insert the particular clause omitted, the proper remedy is by error to the Supreme Court, where the erroneous decree may be corrected.</p>

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1857-11-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 7 later decisions — most recently June 1934

1 federal appellate · 5 state decisions

20185718601870188018901900191019201930decided

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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Catón, C. J.

¶1This was not a clerical mistake of the clerk in entering up the decree which was rendered by the court, but was an error of the court in rendering the decree, which should be reversed on error. There is nothing to show that the court noticed the prayer of the bill, that the rights of the widow, in the lease, should be reserved to her in the sale to be made of the premises, and that the judge intended to reserve such right in the decree. The draft of the decree was drawn by the complainants’ solicitor, and he swears that he inadvertently omitted to insert the saving clause, according to the prayer of the bill. The presumption is, that the court inspected the draft thus drawn, and pronounced it as the decree of the court, without critically comparing it with the bill, and hence was inadvertently led into the error which, undoubtedly, exists in the decree. The clerk correctly copied into the record the draft of the decree as it was rendered. If the judge’s minutes showed that there was a saving clause, we might presume that the draft prepared by the solicitor did not express the whole of the decree, and that the clerk had, by mistake, omitted to enter the saving clause in the decree, when the amendment might have been authorized by the statute of jeofails, but there is nothing to show that the court ever had an intention to insert such saving clause. This, then, was clearly a judicial, and not a clerical, error, which can only be corrected in this court.

¶2The order must be reversed and the suit remanded.

¶3Decree reversed.

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