Pacific Dry Goods Co. v. Superior Court

KNIGHT, J. More than five years after petitioner had filed an appeal in the superior court from a judgment rendered against it by a justice of the peace while exercising the jurisdiction of the small claims court, the superior court, on motion of the plaintiff in the action, dismissed the appeal pursuant to the mandatory provisions of section 981a of the Code of Civil Procedure, which require the superior court, on its own initiative or on motion of any interested party, to dismiss any appeal theretofore or thereafter taken from the justice court when the appealing party has failed to bring said appeal to trial in the superior court within one year after the same is filed therein. And petitioner now seeks by this proceeding in certiorari to have the order of dismissal annulled.

Said section 981a was enacted in 1923; and prior thereto it had been held in three early cases, the last of which was Kraker v. Superior Court, 15 Cal. App. 651 [115 Pac. 663], that in justice court appeals taken by a defendant on questions of law and fact it was incumbent on the plaintiff in the action, and not the defendant as the appealing [709]party, to bring the appeal to trial in the superior court. And as ground urged for the annulment of the order of dismissal herein petitioner contends that said section 981a when enacted applied exclusively to appeals from justices’ courts and did not become operative as to appeals from small claims courts until 1933, at which time section 927j was revised, reenacted and renumbered as section 117j of said code; that the revised section contained no retrospective clause, and that therefore, inasmuch as the appeal herein was taken prior to such revision, the judicial doctrine restated in the Kraker case, supra, and not the legislative rule established by said section 981a, should have been held controlling herein in determining the motion for dismissal. We find no merit in the foregoing contention.

The manifest purpose of the enactment of section 981a was to abrogate the judicial doctrine declared by the earlier cases above referred to, and to establish a new uniform rule contrary thereto which should thereafter govern the superior court in the exercise of its power in dealing with the dismissal of all appeals from inferior courts and which also would be in conformity with the settled doctrine governing the dismissal of appeals taken from superior court judgments, namely, that the burden is on the appealing party to prosecute his appeal with diligence; otherwise it will be dismissed. The small claims court came into existence in 1921, two years prior to the enactment of section 981a, but, as will hereinafter appear, an independent tribunal was not created. The law provided merely for a subsidiary of the justice court. By virtue of section 927 of the same code, also enacted in 1921, “All justices of the peace” were charged with the duty of exercising the jurisdiction conferred upon the small claims courts; and as said in Hughes v. Municipal Court, 200 Cal. 215 [252 Pac. 575], “The legislature by providing the small claims court procedure did not set up a separate, independent judicial tribunal to be presided over by a judge elected or appointed exclusively to perform the duties prescribed by the small claims court statute, but made it the duty of the several justices of the peace of the state to enforce its provisions. In other words, additional duties were imposed by statute upon the justices of the peace. . . . Thus it will be seen that a separate, formally constituted court was not created, but a certain procedure was merely adopted as to small demands,