Page:North Dakota Reports (vol. 1).pdf/468

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444
NORTH DAKOTA REPORTS.

books. § 2915, Compiled Laws. Under such a statute, the condition of a pledgee with an unrecorded transfer would be similar to that of a mortgagee whose real or chattel mortgage should not be recorded or filed. Nay, his situation would be worse. A mortgagee’s lien in such a case cannot be defeated by the levy of an attachment without notice. But a creditor of a pledgor of stock, who attaches the same in ignorance of a transfer thereof, no transfer on the books having been made, secures a lien which is superior to the interest of the pledgee, and his paramount lien cannot be be defeated by subsequent notice of the transfer. Jn re Murphy, 51 Wis. 519, 8 N. W. Rep. 419; Fiske v. Carr, 20 Me. 301; Skowhegan v. Cutler, 49 Me. 315; Naglee v. Wharf Co., 20 Cal. 529; Weston v. Mining Co., 5 Cal. 186; Strout v. Mining Co., 9 Cal. 78; Fisher v. Bank, 5 Gray, 373; Sabin v. Bank, 21 Vt. 353; Cheever v. Meyer, 52 Vt. 66; Bank v. Gridley, 91 Ill. 457; Northrop v. Turnpike Co., 3 Conn. 549; Pinkerton v. Railroad Co., 42 N. H. 462; Ft. Madison Lumber Co. v. Batavian Bank, (Iowa) 32 N. W. Rep. 336; Colt v. Ives, 31 Conn. 25; Sibley v. Bank, 133 Mass. 515; Bank v. Williston, 138 Mass. 244; People v. Robinson, (Cal. ) 1 Pac. Rep. 156. To say, in the light of this statute and its construction, that a power vested in the pledgee to record the transfer was intended by the pledgor not for the purpose of conferring on the pledgee power to protect himself while a pledgee by making such a record, is downright nonsense. Said the court in Rich v. Boyce, 39 Md. 314: “So far from the transfer of stock to the appellee’s own name being a wrongful conversion, it was the exercise of an undoubted right, conferred upon him by the appellant. Without such right the pledge would have been doubtful security, as the stock would have been liable to execution or attachment by any creditor of the appellant.” To same effect, Coleb. Coll Sec. §288. But where the pledgor not only authorizes a record of the transfer to be made by the pledgee, such record being essential to the latter’s protection, but makes the transfer on the books himself, as in the case at bar, by surrendering his old certificates and issuing directly to the pledgee new certificates, signed by the pledgor himself as president of the corporation, no room is left for the inquiry whether the pledgee