Crosby v. Turner
Crosby v. Turner
Opinion of the Court
The complainant (appellant) and the respondent! (appellee) accepted from Huida Turner, the mother of complainant and the wife of respondent, a voluntary conveyance (Waddail v. Vassar, 72 South. 14 1 ) of certain lands belonging to Huida Turner. To this conveyance complainant ascribes her interest in the land. Subsequently, in 1907, the husband received his wife’s conveyance to him alone of this land. Huida Turner died in 1908. The complainant seeks by her amended bill to cancel this conveyance of 1907 on the ground of' fraud and undue influence. The respondent asserts through the grounds of demurrer enumerated that the conveyance jointly to the complainant and to him is invalid as to her because he did not join with his wife in the conveyance of an undivided interest in the land to her. The deed, in so far as its contemplated effect was to invest right or title to the land in complainant, was undoubtedly void, a nullity, because the husband did not join in it as the statute (Oode, § 4494) prescribes. The apt analogy afforded by our ruling with respect to a conveyance of the homestead executed by the husband alone to his wife and his children in Wallace v. Feibleman, 179 Ala. 589, 60 South. 290, confirms this conclusion; the effects of the ruling being to . uphold the conveyance to the extent it in *190 vested the wife with title (one-sixth) to the homestead and to annul it as a conveyance to the children of the five-sixths interests that would have passed to them by the instrument if it had been validly executed.
“The doctrine of estoppel, * * * can go nó further than to preclude a party from denying that he has done that which he had the power to do.” McIntosh v. Parker, 82 Ala. 238, 240, 3 South. 19, 20; Gibson v. Clark, 132 Ala. 370, 374, 31 South. 472.
The husband haying no power to import validity into a conveyance by the wife-alone of her lands to -a third person, except through the exclusive method prescribed by the statute (Code, § 4494), it is manifest that no act or conduct of his could render valid her conveyance of her land without his joinder therein as the statute prescribes. Any other conclusion would subvert and, avoid the obvious purpose of the statute. The decree sustaining the demurrer on the grounds mentioned was well rendered.
Affirmed.
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