Louisville & Nashville R. R. v. Risenstein
Louisville & Nashville R. R. v. Risenstein
Opinion of the Court
The plaintiff, who is appellee here, brought his action against the carrier in the lower court to recover damages for failure to deliver, and injury in transit to, household goods, delivered by plaintiff to the defendant carrier at Sayre,
The defendant pleaded the general issue and interposed special pleas, to which demurrers were sustained by the court, setting up a special contract with the shipper by which it undertook to limit its liability as to recoverable damages not to exceed $5 per hundredweight, due to the fact that the plaintiff chose one of two legally established rates — a reduced or lower rate based on a stipulation as to the value of the goods shipped, limiting the amount of recovery in case of loss or damage to $5 per hundredweight, the stated value of the goods.
The list of the goods lost, from which the plaintiff was allowed to refresh his memory while testifying as a witness, is shown to have been made by the witness from his own personal knowledge at or about the time of the occurrence of the transaction, and although during his examination he referred to the list of the goods lost as made out by him to be a “copy” from the original list containing all of the items of goods shipped, it is manifest from the plaintiff’s testimony that it was such an original memorandum of facts made by him at the time, and of which he had personal knowledge, as would make it permissible for him to refer to the memorandum to refresh his memory.
The oral charge of the court, construed as a whole, is a correct and fair exposition of the law of the case, and there is no merit in the exceptions to the excerpts from the charge made the basis of assignments of error. If in parts of the charge the court seemingly left it to the jury to decide whether the special contract limiting the value of the goods to $5 per hundredweight was effective and binding on the plaintiff, this was not prejudicial error to the defendant of which it can complain.
From what we have said, it follows that we are of the opinion that the trial court was not in error in its rulings in passing upon the written instructions raising the same questions that we have already considered in' this opinion and passed upon adversely to the contentions of the appellant.
Affirmed.
Case-law data current through December 31, 2025. Source: CourtListener bulk data.