Compañía Azucarera v. Registrar of Property of Humacao
Compañía Azucarera v. Registrar of Property of Humacao
Opinion of the Court
delivered the opinion of the Court.
A contract for the grinding of cane and for agricultural advances was executed August 1st, 1984, for a term which was to expire with the grinding season of 1936. By the terms of this contract, the grinding season was defined as “January to June of each year.” One of the clauses provided that the contract might be extended year after year by mutual agreement in the form of a notarial instrument. Notarial instruments were executed July 30th, 1936, July 14th, 1937 and April 26th, 1938. The first of these instru
A registrar of property refused to note the third .of these instruments in the registry of property, because, by the terms of the original contract, the planter was to receive seven and one-half pounds of sugar for every hundred-weight of cane-delivered to the mill and was to suffer a reduction of thirty-five cents per hundred-weight to cover cost of transportation-from the mill to New York.
The first contention of appellant is that the registrar erred in not taking into consideration section 19 of “An Act to regulate contracts for the purchase and sale of sugar cane, as well as the procedure to he followed by the centrals of Puerto Rico in determining the erystallizable sugar per cent in the cane delivered by the colonos for grinding; to create a sugar board; to fix the powers and duties thereof, and for other purposes,” approved May 13,1937 (Session Laws, 261).
Sections 15, 17 and 19 of the Act of 1937, read as follows:
“Section 15. — Every contract entered into, or every practice introduced, in contravention of the provisions of this Act, shall be null and inexistent. ”
“Section 17. — No contract entered into in violation of any of the-provisions of this Act shall be registrable in the registry of agricultural contracts created by Act No-. 10 of 1025, as amended.”
“Section 19. — This Act shall not be applicable to contracts entered into prior to its approval.”
The Act took effect ninety days after the date of approval. We shall assume, as does the brief for appellant, that as far as the first assignment of error is concerned, the ruling of the registrar must be affirmed, unless the case comes within the exception established by section 19.
The original contract was, of course, a contract entered into prior to the approval of the Act of 1937. It therefore-comes clearly within the exception established by section 19. For the purposes of this opinion it may be conceded that the-
Another contention is that the law is contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and to the first paragraph of section 2 of the Organic Act of Puerto Rico. The propositions stated, but not elaborated, in the brief for appellant are not self evident. It is quite conceivable that they are not wholly without merit.
The ruling appealed from must be affirmed.
Case-law data current through December 31, 2025. Source: CourtListener bulk data.