Pierson v. Metropolitan Bank

Citations

• 106 La. 298

Syllabus

<p>Syllabus.</p> <p>1. The administrator of the succession of a bailee is entitled to continue the possession of his decedent, and has an action to revendicate this possession as against a mere trespasser.</p> <p>2. While a pledgor may not contest the validity of a pledge for want of delivery, his administrator, in case the succession is insolvent, may; the administrator being the representative not of the decedent, but of the creditors of the succession, whose right to contest such pledge cannot be denied.</p> <p>3. Under the law of Louisiana a warehouse receipt is not the ordinary warehouse receipt of commerce, but is a technical instrument governed both as to its Issuance and as to the manner of its pledge by statute; and a material departure from the provisions of this statute, either in the form in which the warehouse receipt is issued, or in the manner in which it is given in pledge, is fatal to the validity of the pledge of such a warehouse receipt.</p> <p>4. A warehouse receipt in the form prescribed by Act 72 of 1876 may stand for the goods themselves, in such way that its delivery will operate a delivery of the goods ; but in order that this should be, the receipt must represent specific goods, or, at any rate, must represent a specific part of a uniform mass; a lot of cotton bales cannot be treated as a uniform mass, it being possible that there should be between the component bales a material dis parity.</p> <p>5. Delivery is essential to the validity of a pledge.</p> <p>6. ' In ascertaining the rank of creditors on the property of the decedent, the legal situation is to be taken as it was_ at the moment of the death.</p> <p>7. Considering that the cotton in controversy was being held to await better prices, and that the defendant took possession of said cotton and sold it without right, the defendant is made to account for the value of said cotton not at the price at which the cotton was sold, but at the market price which obtained a few months after th