The official acts of any person in possession of a public office and exercising the functions thereof shall be valid and binding as official acts in regard to all persons interested or affected thereby, whether such person be lawfully entitled to hold the office or not and whether such person be lawfully qualified or not; but such person shall be liable to all the penalties imposed by law for usurping or unlawfully holding office, or for exercising the functions thereof without lawful right or without being qualified according to law.
Miss. Code Ann. § 25-1-37
Acts of de facto officer valid
Applied in 6 court decisions — leading case Polk v. State (1992)
Most recently applied in 801 So. 2d 824 - Chambliss v. State (December 2001)
Codes, 1857, ch. 6, art 194; 1871, § 317; 1880, § 415; 1892, § 3065; 1906, § 3473; Hemingway’s 1917, § 2811; 1930, § 2899; 1942, § 4045.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Current official text: Mississippi Code (LexisNexis). Digitized from the UniCourt Code Improvement Commission public-domain capture. Reproduced from public-domain Mississippi statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.