Wilkes v. Hunt
Wilkes v. Hunt
Opinion of the Court
The opinion of the court was delivered by
The appellant is not satisfied with the judgment of the superior court dismissing his action brought to restrain the commissioner of public lands from executing •and delivering to the other respondents a contract for certain school lands alleged to have been sold to them in pur
Were we clear that such results would follow we should feel inclined to reverse the judgment, since it is plain that the intention of the statute is to reimburse persons situated as the appellant avers himself to be. But he seems to have not only one, but even two other remedies, either of which would save him harmless. In the first place, if there has been no compliance with the statute by the appraisement of his improvements, certainly no court would permit a purchaser under those circumstances to interfere with his possession of the land until he is compensated as the law requires. Secondly, the purchaser is required to pay the appraised value to the owner of the improvements; that is, he is the debtor of the owner to that amount and must pay it within thirty days. He can be sued for the debt; and if there has been no appraisement, the court and a jury can fix the reasonable value as well as the commissioners.
With such a wealth of remedies at his hand we think the state should be permitted to proceed with its business without the hindrance of an injunction, and the judgment is therefore affirmed.
Dunbar, Scott and Hoyt, JJ., concur.
Anders, C. J., not sitting.
Reference
- Full Case Name
- P. S. Wilkes v. L. S. J. Hunt, Griffith Davies, F. A. Twitchell and W. T. Forrest
- Cited By
- 11 cases
- Status
- Published
- Syllabus
- SCHOOL LANDS — SALE—IMPROVEMENTS—FAILURE TO APPRAISE — REMEDIES. Under Gen. Stat., title 24, ch. 1, regulating the- appraisal and sale of school lands by boards of county commissioners, the commissioners are not required to act in their ordinary capacity, but as appraising and selling agents of the state, and an appeal will not lie from their failure to appraise improvements on leased school lands. Where a lessee of school lands has made improvements thereon for which no appraisement was made when the lands were sold by the state, his remedy is not injunction to prevent the delivery of a contract of sale, but he can retain possession of the lands until compensated as the law requires, or he can sue the purchaser, for debt and have the value of his improvements fixed by a court and jury.