Public-domain · open source

362 Pa. 468

67 A.2d 129

Pew Trust

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Decided May 25, 1949

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania · decided 1949-05-25

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

““By Indenture of inter vivos trust, dated July 16, 1908, Sarah W. Warden, Settlor, transferred and assigned certain assets to Germantown Trust Company (now The Pennsylvania Company for Banking and Trusts), Trustee, reserving to herself the income therefrom for life and providing that upon her death the income should be distributed among her children and issue of deceased children until the happening of certain contingencies (not here relevant), whereupon the trust should terminate and the principal be distributed among her children and issue as more particularly set forth therein. Settlor executed a number of amendments and supplements thereto, the last of which, dated December 22, 1916, provided, inter alia: ‘. . . all allotments of bonds, stock or stock dividends shall be treated and regarded as belonging to the principal of the estate, and not as income.’ Settlor died April 11, 1918. “The trustee has received certain stock dividends and rights. The account before the Court has been filed to ascertain whether the stock dividends and rights are income or principal. . . . “The Uniform Principal and Income Act of May 3, 1945, P. L. 416, 20 PS 3471, provides, inter alia, as follows: ‘Any profit or loss resulting upon any change in form of principal shall enure to or fall upon principal, unless the testator or creator of the trust directs otherwise.’ (Section 3). ‘All dividends on shares of a corporation forming a part of the principal which are payable in shares of. the corpora”

quoted by 1 later decision, including Warden Trust

““These are appeals from a decree of an orphans’ court. The account was by trustees of an inter vivos trust. Exceptions of the life tenants to the adjudication were sustained, while those of the remaindermen and of the trustees were dismissed. These appeals followed.”

quoted by 1 later decision, including Fownes Trust

Relies on Crawford Estate

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1949-05-25

How this case has been cited

Cited by 33 later decisions — most recently December 1994 · most notably Catherwood Trust (1961), 440 Pa. Super. 195 - Estate of Pew (1994)

33 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.

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¶1 Opinion by

Mr. Justice Allen M. Stearns,

¶2 *469 These are appeals from a decree of an orphans’ court. The account was by trustees of an inter vivos trust. Exceptions of the life tenants to the adjudication were sustained, while those of the remaindermen and of the trustees were dismissed. These appeals followed.

¶3 By sustaining the life tenants’ exceptions and dismissing those of the remaindermen, the court below correctly determined that the provisions of the Uniform Principal and Income Act of May 3,1945, P. L. 416, 20 PS 3471, and the Principal and Income Act of July 3, 1947, P. L. 1283, 20 PS 3470, are unconstitutional when applied retroactively to trusts created prior to their enactments: See Crawford Estate, 362 Pa. 458, 67 A. 2d 124.

¶4 In dismissing the trustees’ exceptions, the learned court below ruled that it was unnecessary to decide, as an additional reason for sustaining exceptions to the adjudication, that the Acts of 1945 and 1947, supra, also impaired the obligation of the contract creating the trust, thus contravening Art. I, Section 17 of the Constitution of Pennsylvania and Art. I, Section 10, Clause 1 of the Constitution of the United States. We agree with this conclusion.

¶5 Decree affirmed. Costs to be paid out of the corpus of the trust fund.