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68 N.H. 407

39 A 432

Walker v. Walker

Supreme Court of New Hampshire

Decided December 5, 1895

Supreme Court of New Hampshire · decided 1895-12-05

Bill in Equity, by the executor of the will of William Walker, praying the direction of the court as to the construction of the will. By the will, the use and income of all the testator’s property were given to the defendant for life. After the payment of certain legacies, the residue was given to the plaintiff.

Relies on Peirce v. Burroughs · Lord v. Brooks · Wheeler v. Perry

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1895-12-05

How this case has been cited

Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently September 1927

1 federal appellate · 7 state decisions

401895190019101920decided

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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Blodgett, J.

¶1 I. The rights to take stock in the several corporations belong to the plaintiff as remainder-man (Peirce v. Burroughs, 58 N. H. 302, 303; Law v. Alley, 67 N. H. 93), and the income thereof only is payable to the defendant as life tenant.

¶2 II. The $200 received from the gas light company, May 4,1893, and derived from a sale of a portion of its corporate property, which was purchased and represented by the issue of capital stock, was not, either in form or in substance, a division of earnings, but a division of so much of the capital of the corporation, and as such goes to the remainder-man (Wheeler v. Perry, 18 N. H. 307, 314), subject to the payment of interest thereon to the tenant for life.

¶3 III. Dividends being rightfully payable only from the profits of a corporation, the fifty per cent dividend upon the seventy shares of Manchester & Lawrence Railroad stock is, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, presumptively to be regarded as a dividend from the earnings, income, and profits of the capital invested in the Manchester & Lawrence road, and therefore as belonging to the defendant as life tenant. Lord v. Brooks, 52 N. H. 72, 78, 79; 2 Per. Tr. (3d ed.), ss. 544, 545, and notes; 5 Am, & Eng. Enc. Law 725-727, 729.

¶4 Case discharged.

All concurred.
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