When either of the parties to any personal action shall die before final judgment, the executor or administrator of such deceased party may prosecute or defend such action, and the court shall render judgment for or against the executor or administrator. If such executor or administrator, having been duly served with a scire facias or summons five days before the meeting of the court, shall neglect or refuse to prosecute or defend the suit, the court may render judgment in the same manner as if such executor or administrator had voluntarily made himself a party to the suit. The executor or administrator who shall become a party shall be entitled to a continuance of the cause until the next term of the court.
Miss. Code Ann. § 91-7-237
Death of party not to abate suit in certain cases
Applied in 8 court decisions — leading case Caine v. Hardy (1991)
Most recently applied in Estate of Pataelain Paulk v. Dr. Roger T. Lott (January 2017)
Codes, Hutchinson’s 1848, ch. 58, art. 1 (47); 1857, ch. 61, art. 49; 1871, § 677; 1880, § 1513; 1892, § 1918; 1906, § 2093; Hemingway’s 1917, § 1760; 1930, § 1714; 1942, § 611.
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.