Magee v. Magee
Supreme Court of Pennsylvania
ERROR to the district court of Allegheny county. Cornelius Darrah, administrator of Samuel Magee against William Pentland, administrator of Christopher Magee.
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ERROR to the district court of Allegheny county. Cornelius Darrah, administrator of Samuel Magee against William Pentland, administrator of Christopher Magee. This was an action of assumpsit, in which the defendant pleaded “ non assumpsit infra sex annosf and the only question which arose in the cause, was whether the acknowledgments made by the defendant’s intestate in his life-time, were such as to relieve the plaintiff’s demand from the operation of the statute of limitations. The testimony on this point and also the opinion of the court below are transcribed into the opinion of this…
1Opinion of the Court
The opinion of the court was delivered by
Houston, J.
I premise, that after judicial decisions in England, statute of limitations on simple contracts, had become useless or worse. These decisions, having been too implicitly followed, in this country, the courts in this state, began more than thirty years ago, to retrace their steps. Perhaps it might have been better at once to have gone back to the original decisions, and the plain meaning of the act and said, it embraced all simple contracts more than six years old, but that the debtor might nevertheless create a new debt by ail express…
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