United States Ex Rel. Levey v. Stockslager

Citations

• 129 U.S. 470
• 9 S. Ct. 382
• 32 L. Ed. 785
• 1889 U.S. LEXIS 1703

Syllabus

<p>The act approved March 2,1867, c. 208,14 Stat. 635, confirmed to the widow and children of one Bouligny, the one sixth part, amounting to 75,840 ■ acres, of a certain land claim in Louisiana, and enacted that, inasmuch as the land embraced in the claim had been appropriated by the United States to other purposes, certificates of new location, in eighty-acre lots, be issued to the widow, in lieu of said lands, to be located on public lands. The next Congress, twenty-eight days afterwards, and on March 30, 1867, passed a joint resolution, which was approved by the President, directing the Secretary of the Interior to suspend the execution of the act, “■until the further order'of Congress/’ No action had meantime been taken by the General Land Office to carry out the act. On a petition by the widow for a mandamus to the Commissioner of the General Land Office directing him to execute and deliver to her the certificates: Held,</p> <p>(1) The execution of the act was suspended not merely until the further order of the same Congress which passed the joint resolution, but until the further order of the legislative body called, in Section 1, of Article 1, of the Constitution, “ a Congress of the United States ”;</p> <p>(2) Tile act did not vest in the beneficiaries a title to specific land, nor give them a vested right in the certificates which were to be issued';</p> <p>(3) No vested right, amounting to property, had attached at the time of the approval of the joint resolution, and it did not deprive the beneficiaries of any property, or right of property, in violation of the Constitution;</p> <p>(4),If the claim, founded on the act, amounted to a contract, the demand for relief would he substantially a prayer for a specific performance of the contract by the United States, jurisdiction to grant which was not given by statute to the court below.</p>