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39 Tex. 415

Ladd v. Pleasants

Texas Supreme Court

Decided July 1, 1873

Texas Supreme Court · decided 1873-07-01

Tried below before the Hon. Henry Mamey. This suit was brought by H. C. Pleasants, administrator of the estate of John York, deceased, to quiet the title to three hundred and eighty acres of land. Pleas-ants, under an order of the County Court of De Witt county, sold, in 1869, to James Ladd, a tract of land as ¡the property of the estate, believed at the time of sale to contain about two hundred acres. The land was bid for at public auction by the acre, and so paid for.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1873-07-01

How this case has been cited

Cited by 3 later decisions — most recently February 1947

3 state decisions

1018731880189019001910192019301940decided

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 mistake which is shown to have been made in the sale—made by the administrator of York’s-estate—is so gross that no court of equity could uphold it. The parties supposed the tract might contain no-more than two hundred acres, whereas it is shown to have contained five hundred and eighty acres. The vendee purchased at a given price per acre. If he had wanted to hold this land equity would require him to have tendered the money at the price paid, or at least a fair value, for the remainder of the land.

¶2*417Equity will not interfere to correct slight and immaterial mistakes in the quantity of land sold, where the parties, both vendor and vendee, are ignorant of the true quantity contained in the tract.

¶3Some notice may be taken of the fact that the vendor in this case was the administrator of an estate, which courts of equity are peculiarly bound to protect from mistakes and frauds.

¶4But had-all the parties been acting in this case sui juris, equity would correct so ruinous a mistake, as where the vendee claims almost three times as much land as he actually purchased. (Smith v. Fry, 24 Texas, 349; O’Connel v. Duke, 29 Texas, 309; Story’s Equity, Secs., 144a, 149.)

¶5The judgment in this case is affirmed.

¶6Affirmed.

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