McMahan v. Dawkins

Citations

• 22 S.C. 314
• 1885 S.C. LEXIS 25

Syllabus

<p>1. A legal and an equitable cause of action may be embraced in one complaint, but must be separately tried, each according to its distinctive mode.</p> <p>2. In action by a judgment creditor in the Court of Equity to set aside a voluntary deed of his debtor, the action must fail unless the plaintiff show that lie had exhausted his legal remedies, the highest and best evidence of which is a return of nulla bona on the execution.</p> <p>3. But a purchaser at sheriff’s sale of the judgment debtor’s interest in a tract of land which this debtor had previously conveyed away, may bring action in the law courts for a recovery of the land, and there attack the defendant’s deed for fraud, without proof that the judgment creditor had exhausted all other remedies.</p> <p>4. Where an administrator, holding the senior judgment against one of the distributees, purchased the debtor’s land at sheriff’s sale, and, by direction of all the distributees, receipted for the proceeds and ordered deed made to this debtor in trust for his wife and children, the deed so made is not a fraud upon his (the debtor’s) other creditors.</p> <p>5. Findings of fact by the judge in a law case tried by him without a jury are not renewable on appeal.</p>