Singer v. Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad

Citations

• 254 Pa. 502
• 98 A. 1059
• 1916 Pa. LEXIS 758

Syllabus

<p>Practice, C. P.- — Eminent domain — Award of viewers — Appeals•—■ Time for talcing appeals — Courts—Powers of.</p> <p>1. The commands of a statute cannot be waived or dispensed with by a court. They require implicit obedience as well from the court as from its suitors.</p> <p>, 2. When a statute fixes the time within which an act must be done, the courts have no power to enlarge it, although it relates to a mere question of practice.</p> <p>3. The court has no power to extend the time for taking an appeal from an award of viewers in eminent domain proceedings as a matter of indulgence; something more than mere hardship is necessary to justify an extension of time, or its equivalent in the allowance of the- act nunc pro tunc.</p> <p>4. A motion to strike off the appeal should have beeá granted where an appeal from an award of viewers was allowed more than thirty days after the filing of the viewers’ report, upon petition merely alleging that the attorney for the plaintiff had not had an opportunity to read the report of the viewers because it had been misplaced in the files in the prothonotary’s office, whereas it appeared the report could have been found -by a vigorous search. *</p>