Estate of Camp (1901) · DecisionDepot

Estate of Camp

Name: California Superior Court Tentative Rulings
Creator: DecisionDepot
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

California Supreme Court Jan 30, 1901 No. Sac. No. 701.Published

Before: Harrison

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Holding. The court held that a judge's determination of jurisdictional facts in an adoption proceeding cannot be challenged in a collateral attack, and that a decedent's successor is estopped from contesting the validity of an adoption order that the decedent would have been estopped from challenging.

Issues

Whether a judge's determination of jurisdictional facts in an adoption proceeding is subject to collateral attack.
Whether a brother of a decedent, claiming rights through the decedent, may challenge the validity of an adoption order involving the decedent's children.

Disposition. affirmed

Quotations verified verbatim against the opinion

“the determination of that fact by the tribunal cannot be questioned in a collateral attack upon its order.”

“Whether the children had heen abandoned by their parents was a jurisdictional fact to be determined by the judge upon the evidence presented to him”

“Inasmuch as the rights of the appellant herein are derived solely through and under the decedent, he can have no greater right to question the validity of the order than would the decedent.”

Synopsis

APPEAL from an order of the Superior Court of Kings County granting letters of administration upon the estate of a deceased person. J. W. Mahon, Judge presiding.

The facts are stated in the opinion of the court.

[470]

HARRISON, J.

Applications for letters of administration, upon the estate of the above-named decedent were presented to the superior court of Kings county by the public administrator of that county, the respondent herein, and also by the appellant, a brother of the deceased. Upon the hearing thereon the court made an order appointing the respondent as such administrator, and directing letters of administration to issue to him. The brother has appealed.

The deceased died intestate, leaving several brothers and sisters and a surviving widow and two adopted children, who at the hearing of the petition were aged respectively about eleven and eight years. The widow died shortly Before the petitions were presented. At the hearing the proceedings taken in the lifetime of the decedent for the adoption of the children, including the order of the judge sanctioning their adoption, and declaring that they should thereafter be regarded and treated as the children of the decedent and bis wife, were read in evidence. In reply thereto the appellant offered to introduce evidence showing that at the time the proceedings were had the children had not in fact been abandoned by their parents. The court excluded this evidence, and the appellant urges that in this ruling the court erred.

While the proceedings for the adoption of a minor child do not constitute judicial proceedings, and. the order of the judge therein is not the judgment of a court, yet under section 227 of the Civil Code, the judge of the superior court has been designated as a tribunal for that purpose, and in the performanee of his duties thereunder exercises judicial functions. It is a well-settled rule that when the jurisdiction of an inferior or special tribunal, or its power to act in any particular casedepends upon the existence of a fact which is to be established before it by extrinsic evidence, the determination of that fact by the tribunal cannot be questioned in a collateral attack upon its order. (Wells on Jurisdiction, sec. 61;

Brittain v. Kinnaird,

1 Brod. & B. 432;

Evansville etc. R. R. Co. v. Evansville,

15 Ind. 421;

Estate of Camp

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Synopsis

HARRISON, J.

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