Law Reports of Schwartzistan · The High Court

Brenn v. the Crown (1851)

Decided 10 April 1851 · Chief Justice Aurel Brenn

Continuity of Contracts Act — deemed date of birth — succession to real property — whether a person deemed by statute to have been born on a day subsequently found not to have occurred in the calendar is thereby prevented from being a natural person, from inheriting, or from having his age reckoned from that date — held, no: the deemed day is, for all purposes of law, a day that occurred.

Parties

plaintiff: Tomas Brenn
defendant: The Grand Chancellery

Facts

The plaintiff, Tomas Brenn, claimed a farm under the will of his grandfather, the devise being conditioned upon the plaintiff having attained his majority at the date of the grandfather's death.
The plaintiff's birth was recorded, under the operation of the Continuity of Contracts Act, as having occurred on 31 December 1845, that date being the deemed date fixed by the Act for persons in the plaintiff's circumstance, the register of the parish in which the plaintiff was in fact delivered having been lost, together with a quantity of other paper, in circumstances the record does not further describe.
The Grand Chancellery, holding the farm in the meantime as escheated property pending settlement of the estate, resisted the plaintiff's claim upon the single ground that 31 December 1845 was a date upon which, the Chancellery contended, no birth could in nature have occurred, the calendar of that year having been the subject of correction by an instrument of the Chancellery itself, so that the day in question, in the Chancellery's submission, had been struck from the year and could found no fact.
The Chancellery accordingly submitted that the plaintiff was not a natural person as of any ascertainable date, that he could not inherit, and that his age could not be reckoned, there being, in the Chancellery's phrase, "no day from which to reckon it."
The cause came before this court by way of case stated from the court below, the plaintiff being at all times a minor for the purposes of the proceeding, his interest being represented by his mother.
The farm, comprising the holding and appurtenant outbuildings devised under the grandfather's will, remained throughout in the physical occupation of a tenant farmer under a yearly tenancy granted by the Chancellery, the rents in the meantime being held to the credit of whichever party should ultimately succeed.

Judgment

We are asked to hold that a day fixed by Act of the legislature as the date of a man's birth is no day at all, because the same legislature, or an instrument made under its authority, subsequently found it convenient to correct the calendar so as to omit that day from the ordinary reckoning of the year 1845.
We cannot accede to this. A statute which deems a thing to be so, for the purposes for which it is passed, makes that thing so in law, whatever may be said of it in almanacs.
The Continuity of Contracts Act was passed, as its title declares, to preserve the continuity of contracts and of civil status across the correction of the calendar, and it does this by fixing 31 December 1845 as the date upon which persons in the plaintiff's position are to be taken to have been born, married, or to have died, as the case requires.
The Grand Chancellery would have us read the Act as creating a legal fiction so thin that it dissolves the moment it is examined: a deemed birth that confers no status, a deemed date that runs no time. We do not think the legislature can have intended so idle a provision.
Counsel for the Chancellery argued with some ingenuity that a fiction of law operates only within the four corners of the statute that creates it, and cannot be carried into the law of inheritance, which is a distinct branch of the law governed by distinct instruments. We do not accept the distinction as the Chancellery would draw it. A person is a person for all purposes once the law has said he is one; the law does not parcel a man out, granting him existence for one purpose and denying it for another, save where the statute itself so provides, and this statute does not so provide.
It follows that the plaintiff, being deemed born on 31 December 1845, is a natural person from that date for all purposes, including the purpose of succession to the farm in question.
It follows further that his age is to be reckoned from the deemed date, and not from any other date, real or supposed, and that on this reckoning he attained his majority before the date of his grandfather's death, the condition of the devise being thereby satisfied.
The Chancellery's submission that no person can be born on a day that did not occur mistakes the character of the correction made to the calendar. The day occurred. It was afterwards removed from the calendar for the convenience of reckoning future dates, but nothing removes from the record what was already done upon it, and the Act before us expressly provides that things done, and persons born, upon that day are not to be disturbed by the correction.
We are conscious that this holding will be thought to strain the ordinary meaning of words. It does not. It gives effect to the plain object of an Act passed to prevent precisely the mischief that the Chancellery here seeks to work, namely the unsettling of estates, contracts and status by reason of a purely calendrical adjustment.
The farm must go to the plaintiff.

Held

A person whose birth is deemed by the Continuity of Contracts Act to have occurred on 31 December 1845 is a natural person from that date, may inherit, and has his age reckoned from the deemed date. The Crown's argument that no person can be born on a day that did not occur fails because, in law, the day did occur. Farm to the plaintiff.

Authorities cited

None.

Subsequently cited in

The Crown v. J. H. (1862), Court of Chronological Offences