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97 Mass. 302

Estabrook v. Earle

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

Decided October 15, 1867

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1867-10-15

Bill in equity setting forth that Martha Ann Barbour of Worcester, one of the respondents, a married woman whose husband was living, purchased as her sole and separate property certain real estate there, and paid for it with her promissory note signed by the complainants as sureties, which on its maturity she failed to pay, and the amount of which she owes to the complainants, who were compelled to pay it by reason of her default; that afterwards she employed the respondent…

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1867-10-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently September 1936

8 state decisions

4018671870188018901900191019201930decided

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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Bigelow, C. J.

¶1We see no reason for holding that the plaintiffs’ remedy is not complete and adequate at law under the trustee process.

¶21. The promissory note on which they seek to charge a married woman by the bill and which it is the object of the suit to cause to be paid out of certain property in the hands of one of the defendants, is a debt contracted with reference to the sole and separate property of such married woman, for which she is liable to be sued at law. Gen. Sts. c. 108, § 3. There is therefore no valid objection to an action against her at common law to recover the debt.

¶32. There is nothing in the nature of the contract on which it is alleged that the defendant, Earle, held money for the use and benefit of such married woman, which takes it out of the provision of law by which a sum of money due to a debtor may be attached and held by virtue of the ordinary trustee process under Gen. Sts. c. 142, §§ 21-31. It is true that the money in his hands is held in trust for the use and benefit of a married woman, but it is on a trust which she can at any moment revoke by á demand of the money, and on a refusal to pay it to her she can immediately maintain an action in her own name to recover it. Money so placed is clearly within the reach of attachment by the trustee process as a debt absolutely due to the cestui que trust. Haskell v. Haskell, 8 Met. 545, 546.

¶4Demurrer sustained.

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