NOTES OF RECENT CASES OF IMPORTANCE FROM THE NATIONAL REPORTER SYSTEM (Copies of the pamphlet Reporters containing full reports of any of these decisions may be secured from the West Pub lishing Company, St. Paul, Minnesota, at 15 cents each. In ordering, the title of the desired case should be given as well as the citation of volume and page of the Reporter in which it is printed.)
CONSTITUTIONAL LAW. (DuE PROCESS AND EQUAL PROTECTION OF THE LAWS — SALES IN BULK. SUPREME COURT OF INDIANA. In Sellers v. Hayes. 72 Northeastern Reporter 119, the Supreme Court of Indiana administers a disabling solar plexus punch to the "Sales in Bulk" law, a test of legislation that has been very popular during the past two or three years, laws similar to the Indiana statute having been en acted in a large number of States. Acts 1901, p. 505, c. 118 (Burns' Ann. St. 1901, §66373, et seq.), declared sales of any portion of a stock of merchandise otherwise than in the ordi nary course of trade, or sales of an entire stock in bulk, fraudulent and void as against creditors whose claims arise from the sale of some part of said stock of merchandise, unless the seller and purchaser shall, at least five days before the sale, make a full, detailed inventory, showing the quantity and cost price to the seller of each article to be included in the sale, and unless the purchaser shall, at least five days before the sale, make in quiry of the seller as to the name and place of business of each creditor of the seller, and the amount owing such creditors, and give each one notice of the proposed sale. Construing this statute as entitling any creditor who has a claim against the original owner on account of sales of goods at wholesale which have gone into the stock to subject the whole stock to liability to satisfy the indebtedness, no matter how small a remnant of the stock sold by him may remain, the court concludes that it constitutes a deprivation of property without due process of law, and a denial of the equal protection of the laws. "To so in terpret the statute," says the court, "would mean that as to a certain class of property, the General Assembly has given to a certain class of creditors the monopoly of a remedy which enables them to impeach the transaction, irrespective of fraud, and that other creditors would be left remediless, so far as the statute is concerned. While there might be some reason in natural justice for giving a creditor a lien upon, or a special right in an article of personal property sold by him for the unpaid purchase price, yet, as there is no essential unity in a stock of goods, so that it can, in all cases, be said that the creditor's contribution to the stock is inseparable, and must, therefore, be held by him as a whole, or lost to him as a whole, •what justice is there in giving to mercantile cred
itors an extraordinary right to follow the stock because they have contributed to build it up, or because some portion of the goods sold by them remains on hand? It will be observed that the remedy is not made dependent upon the question as to whether there is, in fact, a confusion of goods; whatever the remedy, it applies to all stocks. Why should a mercantile creditor be given a right as against that portion of a stock which is paid for, which is denied to other cred itors? If the indebtedness is in part for goods which have been sold and the proceeds have gone into the corpus of the debtor's estate, why has the favored creditor the right to secure his pay in full when the banker, who also extended credit, the unpaid clerk, who aided in the transaction of the business, and the creditors, generally, of the merchant, are denied a remedy under the statute? ' ' As supporting the rule that under the fourteenth amendment to the federal constitution, the state cannot, through its agencies, exercise arbitrary and capricious power over persons or property, the court cites a number of decisions of the United States Supreme Court, among them: Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 6 Supreme Court Reporter 1064; Dent, v. West Virginia, 9 Supreme Court Reporter 231; Duncan v. Missouri, 14 Supreme Court Reporter 570; Gulf, etc., R. Co. v. Ellis, 17 Supreme Court Reporter 255; Holdcn v. Hardy, 18 Supreme Court Reporter 383; Barbier v. Connolly, 5 Su preme Court Reporter 357. CONTEMPTS. (INHERENT POWERS OF THB COURT — REGULATION BY LEGISLATURE.) INDIANA APPELLATE COURT. Anderson et al. v. Indianapolis Drop Forging Co., 72 Northeastern Reporter 277, while resem bling Jacobs v. Cohen, 90 New York Supplement 854, and People v. Grout, 72 Northeastern Re porter 464, elsewhere considered in these notes in that it is an outgrowth of the effort of trades unionism to enforce its demands, derives its main interest from the assertion of the doctrine that the power of a chancery court to enforce its injunctive decrees by contempt proceedings is in herent in the nature of the court and cannot be circumscribed or taken away by legislative enact ment. The matter which receives most attention in the opinion is the construction of the scope and application of Burns' Ann. St., 1901, §§ 1024,. 1026. This statute relates to contempts of court, prescribes the penalties and methods of procedure,
