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5 Bedell 360

60 N.E 660

Curtis v. . Albee

New York Court of Appeals

Decided June 4, 1901

New York Court of Appeals · decided 1901-06-04

This action was brought to so reform an assignment of a chose in action as to state that the amount of the claim assigned was $1,191.28, instead of $2,036.54, as stated in the written instrument, and for other relief. The facts, as found by the trial court, were substantially as follows: On the 12th of December, 1896, Sidney B. Roby, then of the city of Rochester, made a general assignment to the plaintiff for the benefit, of his creditors.

Relies on Van Alen v. . American National Bank

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1901-06-04

How this case has been cited

Cited by 49 later decisions — most recently February 2019 · most notably Amend v. Hurley (1944), Salomon v. North British & Mercantile Insurance (1915)

6 federal appellate · 3 district · 33 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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Landon, J.

¶1 (dissenting). I dissent. Welker was the attorney of the plaintiff to collect the account which he held against the assignee of Hoffman & Company, and he had collected thereon for the plaintiff $745.26, which yet remained in his hands at the time the plaintiff sold the account to the defendant, but the plaintiff did not know it. In selling the account the plaintiff did not sell the money in Welker’s hands. It was the plaintiff’s money. Welker had received it in a fiduciary capacity and, therefore, whether he paid the identical or substituted money to the defendant is immaterial. It was his duty to pay one or the other kind of money to the plaintiff, and when he paid $600 of it to the defendant, the defendant knew the facts. He demanded of Welker the money which Welker had collected upon the account of plaintiff’s assignor against the assignee of Hoffman & Company, and Welker paid him that money, and whether in identical or substituted currency, he got what he asked for, and cannot be heard to quibble over the identity of the particular cash. The plaintiff could trace and follow the money, whichever kind it was, into the defendant’s hands, and, having found it there, could reclaim it. ( Van Alen v. American National Bank, 52 N. Y. 1.) The plaintiff need not ratify the payment to the *368 defendant; lie sought and found his money where his attorney had misplaced it. The judgment in his favor against the defendant for the recovery of the money is right and should be affirmed. What is said in the prayer for judgment in the complaint, and in the judgment itself, about reforming the contract of assignment, is an immaterial addition to the true cause of action stated, for which a money recovery has been had. So much of the judgment as directs a reformation of the contract is harmless.

¶2 O’Brien, Bartlett and Martin, JJ., concur with Vann, J.; Parker, Ch. J., concurs with Landon, J.; Cullen, J., takes no part.

¶3 Judgment reversed, etc.

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