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48 Tex. 212

Clark v. Brown

Texas Supreme Court

Decided July 1, 1877

Texas Supreme Court · decided 1877-07-01

Tried below before the Hon. Joseph Bledsoe. This action was begun, in the District Court of Red River county, in March, 1874, and tried May 25, 1877. .The defendant filed a general demurrer, which was overruled. Less than two hundred dollars ($198.40) was due, of principal, when the suit was brought. The assuming of jurisdiction by the court was assigned for error.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1877-07-01

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently October 1966

4 state decisions

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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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Roberts, Chief Justice.

¶1Upon an accurate calculation, made in the legal manner, it is found that the last payment *213credited on the note, and admitted in the petition, brings down the principal then due and unpaid on the note to an amount less than two hundred dollars.

¶2The first payment was in excess of the then accrued interest, and reduced the principal to the sum of $206.71. The principal in the note could never get any larger, and by calculating the interest on that amount to the second, third, and fourth payments, and deducting each payment up to the time each payment is made, it will be found, that upon the deduction of the fourth payment from the principal and interest then accrued, thus ascertained, the principal was reduced to an amount below two hundred dollars, by twenty cents, as appellant estimates it, but by near one dollar or over, as we find it here.

¶3This being a question of jurisdiction determinable by a particular amount in dollars and cents,—to wit, two hundred dollars,—the smallness of the deficiency in reaching that amount is immaterial, if it can certainly be ascertained by a proper calculation that an appreciable deficiency does actually exist.

¶4This case should therefore have been transferred to the Justice’s Court, under the Constitution and laws in existence and of force at the time it was tried in the District Court.

¶5The judgment must therefore be reversed, and the cause remanded to the District Court, for its action, in accordance with this opinion.

¶6Reversed and remanded.

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