Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 8.djvu/424

410 PEDBBAIi EEPOBTEE. �In V. S. V. Stone, 2 Wall. 535, Mr. Justice Grier said : " Patents are sometimes issued unadvisedly or by inistake, when the officer has no authority in law to grant them, or when another party has a higher equity and should have received the patent. In such cases, courts of law will pronounce them void. The patent is but evidence of a grant, and the offleer who issues it acts ministerially and not judicially. ii he issues a patent for land reserved from sale by law, such patent is void for want of authority." �On the other hand, if the, patent is valid at law, but voidable in equity, it naust be by reasori of some superior equity on the part of the eomplainant that entitles him to charge it with a trust in his favor, or to restrain the defendant froin an inequitable use of it, to his injury; but the complainant asserts none such now in this prooeed- ing, and insists on treafiiig it as utterly without any legal force what- ever. If the complainant should admit that the effect of the patent was to put the legal title in the defendant, and allege equitable grounds whereby it would enure to his benefit, or grounds on which it should be cancelled as having been obtained in fraud of his equi- table rights, there would be place for the exercise of equitable juris- diction; but the controversy aa he makes it, on the bill and proof, is a contest between adverse claimsof . a purely legal nature. Such a controversy is only to be settled in a court of lawj according to the principles and methods and under the guaranties of the common law. �It follows that the bill must be dismissed; butj of course, without prejudice to the rights of either capable of being enforced in the pending action at law, and also without prejudice to the complain- ant's right to file a bill in equity hereafter, in the event it should be decided in the action at law that the defendant's patent is valid to pass to him the legal title, to charge him as trustee, and eompel a conveyanoe on any equitable ground the complainant may be able to establish. �See FusHell y. Hughes, supra. ��� �