Luzerne Legal Register Reports, Volume 17

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Commonwealth, ex rel. Davis v. Smiles. Poor district?Officers?Appointment?Holding over. 1. The law applicable to a certain Poor District contemplated the election in May, for a year, of a secretary, by a Poor Board composed of five members. 2. At that time two members of the board were holding over pending appointment of their successors on the expiration of their term, and these two, with the other three, including the relator, concurred in the election of the defendant. 3. In June the places of the two holding over were filled by appointment, and there upon the two new members, with the other three, acting upon the assumption that the election of defendant had been superseded, elected the relator. 4. Held, that the facts took the case out of the principle that a board composed in part of hold-over members knowing the liability of the latter to be superseded at any moment should not be suffered to intercept in the matter of appointments the action of their successors, and that the relator had no standing to question the defendant's right to hold the office. Common Pleas Luzerne county. No. 468, October term, 1913. Fuller, P. J., July 18, 1913.?This proceeding is a case stated in the nature of a mandamus, whereby the parties in a friendly spirit seek to have determined the question whether the relator or the defendant is de jure secretary of the poor board in the district designated "Directors of the Poor of Jenkins Township, Pittston Borough and Pittston Township," with the agreement, "that if the Court be of the opinion under the stated facts that it was beyond the power of the board on May 5, 1913, to elect C. W. Smiles as secretary of the board for the balance of the fiscal year, to-wit, until April 30, 1914, judgment shall be entered in favor ...