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41 Mo. 501

Fletcher v. Schaumburg

Supreme Court of Missouri

Decided October 15, 1867

Supreme Court of Missouri · decided 1867-10-15

Louis Circuit Court. I. The sheriff in a partition sale is trustee of the fund. He held the note .taken for the purchase money of the land subject to the order of the court; he has no other authority to collect the money and pay it over under the order of the court; he could not sell the note. II.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1867-10-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently November 1903

4 state decisions

2018671870188018901900decided

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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Wagner, Judge,

¶1delivered the opinion of the court.

¶2This was an action brought by the plaintiff against the defendant on a negotiable promissory note. The note was given by the defendant for the purchase of land sold in partition by the sheriff, and made payable two years after date to “ James Castello, Shff.,” and negotiable and endorsed by the payee before maturity. The endorsement on the back of the note had the designation “ Shff.” appended to Castello’s name, but there was nothing to show that the plaintiff as endorsee had any other notice that the payee held it in a fiduciary capacity,' or that in its sale he was committing a breach of trust. The defendant resisted the payment of the note and claimed an interest in the proceeds as one of the distributees for whose benefit the land was sold. In the Circuit Court, the defendant’s counsel asked the court to declare the law to be that the note itself with the endorsement thereon was sufficient to impart notice to the plaintiff that the money was payable to the sheriff Castello in his official capacity as such, which declaration the court refused to give, and then found for the plaintiff.

¶3The instrument sued on is simply a negotiable promissory note made- payable to Castello, and the abbreviation “ Shff.” added to his name is merely descriptive. There is nothing in the body of the note or the endorsement to apprise any one that it belonged to any other person than the payee, or *503that he held it in any capacity other than as his individual property. To have given the instruction prayed for by the defendant would have been going farther than any case that we are aware of has ever gone, and would have overturned principles of law long settled.

¶4Judgment affirmed.

The other judges concur.
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