Bollinger v. Gallagher

Citations

• 170 Pa. 84
• 37 W.N.C. 8
• 32 A. 569
• 1895 Pa. LEXIS 1365

Syllabus

<p>Married women — Buying property on credit — Contest with husband's creditors- — Evidence.</p> <p>A wife may take a good title to property bought on credit, and the addition of her husband’s name on the notes given for purchase money will not prevent her from showing that the purchase was made exclusively upon her credit.</p> <p>On an issue between a married woman and the execution creditors of her husband to determine the ownership of property levied upon as the property of the husband, where the evidence for the wife tends to show that the goods were bought on the credit of the wife at a time when the husband was insolvent; that in payment for them a note was given signed by the wife, her sureties and her husband; that all the parties supposed that the husband’s signature was necessary in order that the note should bind the wife, and that the payee of the note as well as the sureties regarded the wife as the real purchaser, it is proper for the court to leave to the juiy, to decide as a question of fact, the purpose for which the husband’s signature was placed upon the note.</p> <p>Where the question to whom credit was in fact given is thus submitted to the jury, it is not ground for reversal that the judge wrongfully assumed, and stated to the juiy, that by the law of the state where the note was executed the > husband’s signature was necessary to make the note binding upon the wife.</p> <p>Evidence — Foreign laws — Expert.</p> <p>The proper way to prove the statutes of another state or country is by a duly authenticated copy, and the unwritten law should be proved by the decisions of the courts, or by the testimony of a witness who is familiar with it.</p> <p>Such law cannot be proved by stating to an attorney at law of a foreign state a hypothetical condition of facts and asking him what would be the law of his own state on such facts. Such a question asks for the opinion of the witness as to what the courts would hold, not for his knowledge of what they had