Public-domain · open source
OpenJurist

39 Cal. 123

Capuro v. Builders' Insurance

California Supreme Court

Decided July 1, 1870

California Supreme Court · decided 1870-07-01

<p>Appeal from the District Court -of the Fourth District, City and County of San Francisco.</p> <p>The ease is stated in the opinion of the Court.</p>

Relies on Kent v. Snyder

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1870-07-01

How this case has been cited

Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently November 1929

11 state decisions

50187018801890190019101920decided

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.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

Temple, J.,

¶1delivered the opinion of the Court:

¶2This action is brought upon a policy of insurance, and the answer, after denying most of the allegations of the complaint, sets up four distinct charges of fraud, but does not charge the plaintiff with having caused the property to have been burned. On the trial, evidence was introduced by the defendant, which, as is claimed by defendant’s counsel, tends-to prove this fact. The evidence had no necessary or obvious tendency to establish such a charge, and may well have been-permitted to come in without objection from -plaintiff on that ground.

¶3The Court, at request of defendant and against the objection of plaintiff, instructed the jury, among other matters, in substance, that ‘ ‘ if the plaintiff was in any way instrumental in causing the buildings to be burned, they should find for the defendant. ”

¶4*125It is claimed that the instruction was erroneous; that no such issue was made by the pleadings.

¶5The rule is, undoubtedly, as stated by appellant, that when a party relies upon fraud, either to support his cause .of action or in defense, he must set up the facts which constitute the fraud. (Kent v. Snyder, 30 Cal. 666.)

¶6It follows, as a necessary consequence of that proposition, that he can prove only those facts which he has set up. Of course he is not required, by the rule, to allege with minuteness all the particulars and circumstances which constitute -the evidence of the alleged fraud, but he must make the charge with sufficient distinctness to enable his adversary to come prepared with his evidence upon the general questions of fraud which will be raised.

¶7In this case, the question ivhether plaintiff caused the building to be burned, was not one of the issues made by the pleadings, and it was, therefore, error to instruct the jury that they could find against the plaintiff on that ground; The denial that the plaintiff had given a correct account of how the fire originated, even if it authorized evidence to show that the fire commenced in the inside of the building; instead of on the outside, as plaintiff had reported, gave no intimation to the plaintiff that he was charged with having started the fire himself.

¶8Order reversed and a new trial ordered.

/39/cal/123 · .json · Public domain