Robbins Investment Co. v. Robbins

SCHAUER, P. J. trial court on stipulated facts; no element of evidentiary conflict is involved and there is no dispute as to what essentially constitutes the sole legal question which must be answered. Hence we refrain from needless narration of the facts and state the question directly: Is a lien impressed on the property of a judgment debtor by the recording in the office of the county recorder of the county where the property is situated of a document certified by the county clerk, which document contains all of the factual data concerning a money judgment required by section 674 of the Code of Civil Procedure to be included in a valid abstract of judgment but which instead of epitomizing the judgment transcribes it in full?

The trial court answered this question in the affirmative and with its conclusion we agree.

The code section (Code Civ. Proc., sec. 674) states that “An abstract of the judgment or decree . . . certified by the clerk or justice of the court where such judgment or decree was rendered, may be recorded with the recorder of any county and from such recording the judgment or decree becomes a lien upon all the real property of the judgment debtor, not exempt from execution, in such county, owned by bim at the time, or which he may afterwards and before the lien expires, acquire. . . . The abstract above mentioned [448]shall contain the following: Title of the court and cause and number of the action; date of entry of the judgment or decree; names of the judgment debtor and of the judgment creditor; amount of the judgment or decree, and where entered in judgment book, minutes or justices’ docket.”

The document recorded in this case contained every item of data specified in the code section and was certified by the clerk of the court. The only attack upon it is predicated on the ground that it contained surplusage; i. e., that it was not an abstract but a transcript (complete copy) of the judgment, hence was not entitled to be recorded under our recording laws and its unauthorized recordation failed to impress a lien on the property of the judgment debtor.

For the purposes of a hypothesis for this decision we may assume that the recordation of the document in question is authorized, if at all, only by the above quoted code section (Code Civ. Proc., sec. 674) and that its unsanetioned recordation would not operate to create a lien. But we conclude that the questioned document satisfies the requirements of an abstract as defined by such code section. The only definition of the term in our codes (other than as applied in the small claims court, Code Civ. Proc., sec. 117m) is that quoted above.