Mid-America Fire & Marine Insurance v. Middleton

Defendants appeal from a judgment entered by the circuit court of Champaign County in a bench trial in favor of the plaintiff and against the defendants.

The amended complaint upon which the case was tried is a paradigm of the obscurantism which infects present-day pleading, the sum of which ofttimes appears to be: write a letter to the judge and let him divine the theory of the action. With such powers of divination as we still possess, we construe the amended complaint as one grounded in the ancient action of trover and conversion and will deal with it in that context. Even though common law…