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219 Ala. 369

122 So 608

Morris v. McElroy

Supreme Court of Alabama

Decided May 23, 1929

Supreme Court of Alabama · decided 1929-05-23

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

““The authority to grant or refuse a continuance of a pending cause resides in the court, and not the judge, and an application for continuance is, as we have respectively (sic repeated ly) held, addressed to the sound discretion of the court, and will not be reviewed, unless the discretion is grossly abused, and then only on appeal, where the facts may be fully presented.””

quoted by 1 later decision, including Persons v. Summers

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1929-05-23

How this case has been cited

Cited by 10 later decisions — most recently March 1963

10 state decisions

5019291930194019501960decided

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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PER CURIAM.

¶1 While we do not approve all that is said in the opinion of the Court of Appeals, we concur in the result.

¶2 The authority to grant or refuse a continuance of a pending cause resides in the court, and not the judge, and an application for continuance is, as we have respectively held, addressed to the sound discretion of the court, and will not be reviewed, unless the discretion is grossly abused; and then only on appeal, where the facts may be fully presented.

¶3 The power and authority to set aside a continuance and reset the case for trial is likewise a power to' be exercised by the court, and rests upon the same principles.

¶4 Therefore, conceding that the court, while being presided over by Judge Snyder, rightfully exercised the power to continue, still it appears from the Ending of the Court of Appeals that the case in question had been regularly assigned for trial, by the Presiding Judge, to Judge McElroy’s docket, and the court presided over by him, in the exercise of its discretion, had the authority to set the continuance aside and reset the case for trial, and mandamus will not be granted to review the exercise of this discretion.

¶5 Though the constitutionality of Acts 1927, p. 637, amending section 6693 of the Code, is *370 argued, the exigency of the case does not require the question to be decided.

¶6 Writ denied.

ANDERSON, O. J., and SAYRE, THOMAS, and BROWN, JJ., concur.
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