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33 Tex. 415

Taliaferro v. Cundiff

Texas Supreme Court

Decided July 1, 1870

Texas Supreme Court · decided 1870-07-01

Tried below before the Hon. Samuel L. Earle. This suit was in the nature of an action of trover, and was brought by Taliaferro to the Spring term, 1866, of Houston District Court, to recover of Cundiff the value of twenty-two bales of cotton, alleged to have been the property of the plaintiff, and to have been taken and converted by the defendant to his own use.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1870-07-01

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently May 1964

4 state decisions

201870188018901900191019201930194019501960decided

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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Walker, J.

¶1The only assignment of error which the court find it necessary to revise is the third; that the court erred in not" *417giving a legal construction to the paper referred to as exhibit A., but left it to the jury to determine the object and meaning of the parties from the paper itself.

¶2It is certainly the duty of the court to construe all written instruments used as evidence in the progress of the cause, or counted on as securing a right or furnishing a remedy.

¶3But here it was as much a question of fact as of law for the jury to determine the meaning of the parties from the contract itself, and it was not improperly left, to the jury to determine the question of fact as witnessed by the written instrument.

¶4"We think the jury determined it correctly, and that there is no error of which the plaintiff ean eomplain. Slice questions of law and fact will often' blend themselves, and when the jury have determined the faets correctly, and have not misconceived their, application to the law, the courts are relieved from the necessity of explaining the legal principles involved.

¶5The judgment of the district court is affirmed.

¶6Affirmed,

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