Llinás Morell v. Registrar of Property of San Germán
Llinás Morell v. Registrar of Property of San Germán
Opinion of the Court
delivered the opinion of the court.
It appears from the hooks of the Registry of Property of San Germán that a conveyance of the property known as “Collado,” executed on May 1, 1913, by Attorney José Salvador Amill Negroni, as attorney in fact of his sister, Maria Eugenia Delfina Amill Negroni, a divorced person, and also by other co-owners caused, in January 1916, the entry of the ninth record of property No. 556, triplicate, at folio 133 of volume 22 of the Municipality of Maricao, with the curable defect that the conveyance did not contain, nor was it accompanied by, the power of attorney granted by Maria Eugenia Delfina Amill Negroni, in favor of her brother José Salvador Amill Negroni, which power of attorney, according to the conveyance, was executed in Maricao on June 6, 19l¿¡, before Notary Miguel Juan Llaneras.
In order to cure said defect the present owner of the property, José Llinás Morell, submitted to the registrar a paper writing, dated April 9, 1935, in which he stated that, after the execution of said power of attorney in 1912, Notary Miguel Juan Llaneras died, and his protocol was sent to the
The registrar refused to correct the curable defect noted in the ninth record of property number 556, and thereupon the present owner of the property took the instant appeal.
The ground upon which the registrar refused to enter the correction sought can be briefly stated thus: That a contract of exchange is essentially different from one of purchase and sale, for which reason it can not be asserted that said power of attorney conferred upon José Salvador Amill Negroni any
Our Civil Code deals separately with the contract of purchase and sale and with that of exchange. It treats of the former in title IY, which includes sections 1334 to 1427, 1930 ed., and of the latter contract in title V, sections 1428 to 1435. According to section 1334, by the contract of purchase and sale one of the contracting parties hinds himself to deliver a specified thing and the other to pay a certain price therefor in money or in something representing the same. According to section 1428, exchange (permuta) is a contract by which each. .of. .the contracting parties hinds himself to give a thing in order to receive another. Both contracts are of the same nature in so far as the delivery of property is concerned, hut they are not looked upon hy the lawmaker as being identical, because not only have they been treated separately in the code but also they involve different transactions, for in one there must be a fixed price in money or its equivalent, whereas in the other one thing is exchanged for another. That they are different is also shown by the care with which the code differentiates them in section 1335, by providing that if the purchase price should consist partly of money and of something' else,, the character of the contract shall be determined by the manifest intention of the contracting parties; and that if this intention should not appear, the contract shall be considered as one of barter if the value of the thing given as a part of the price exceeds that of the money or its equivalent; otherwise it shall be considered as a sale. Their effects are different also, for section 1411 grants the right of legal redemption to co-owners where the thing is acquired by purchase or in payment of a debt (dación en pago). Thus, in a judgment of the Supreme Court of Spain, Jurisprudencia Civil, vol. 179, p. 879, after the court had declared that the deed involved in
By reason of the foregoing, we can not hold that because José Salvador A mill Negroni was empowered to make the exchange he effected in the name of his principal, Maria Eugenia Delfina Amill Negroni, as appears from the sixth record of property No. 553, of Maricao, he had implied authority to sell her property, as maintained by the appellant.
The decision appealed from must be affirmed.
Case-law data current through December 31, 2025. Source: CourtListener bulk data.