Certiorari to review proceedings of the Board of Supervisors of Sacramento County.

In 1868.au Act was passed providing for the government of the County of Sacramento. The third section of the Act divided the county into five Supervisor Districts, and the first section of the Act declared that: “All that portion of the State which by law now is or hereafter may be designated as Sacramento County, shall be governed by a Board of Supervisors, which Board of Supervisors shall be a body politic and corporate by the name and style of ‘The Board of Supervisors of the County of Sacramento,’ and by that name they and their successors shall be known in law, shall have perpetual succession, may make, have, alter, and renew a common seal, different and distinct from that of the County Clerk; may sue, complain, and defend in all Courts and in all actions and proceedings whatever.”

The Political Code, enacted by the Legislature in 1872, and which went into effect January 1st, 1873, divided the counties of the State into classes, "according to their population, and declared that counties of the first class, containing twenty thousand inhabitants or over, must have seven Supervisors, and that if, under the classification, the number of Supervisors of a county was increased or diminished, the Board of Supervisors must redistrict the county to correspond with the classification. (See Political Code, Secs. 4022, 4025.) The County of Sacramento contained more than twenty thousand inhabitants. Section four thousand of the Code further provides that “ every county is a body politic and corporate,” etc. The nineteenth section of the Code further provided that nothing in the Code affected any of the provisions of “Acts incorporating or chartering municipal corporations, and Acts amending or supplementing such Acts,” etc.

On the 7th day of February, 1873, the Board of Supervisors divided the county into seven Supervisor Districts. Two of the five Supervisors, Domingos and Moore, voted against the order redistricting the county, and applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari to set aside the- order as in excess of the jurisdiction of the Board.