The case of Citizens Savings Bank & Trust Company v. Sexton, Executor of Chapman, et al., in 1923 revolved around the issue of whether a bank could be held liable for not honoring checks due to insufficient funds in an account. The plaintiff was the executor of an estate that had issued several checks from its account at Citizens Savings Bank & Trust Company before it went bankrupt. When these checks were presented for payment after bankruptcy proceedings began, they were returned unpaid because there weren't enough funds in the account to cover them. The court ruled that under Tennessee law (where this case took place), banks are not obligated to honor such checks if there aren't sufficient funds available and therefore cannot be held liable for doing so.

In the dissenting opinion for Citizens Savings Bank & Trust Company v. Sexton, the justice argued that there was no legal basis to deny a bank's claim simply because it had not been presented within two years of the decedent's death. The majority decision held that Tennessee law required claims against an estate to be filed within this time frame, but the dissenting justice pointed out that this requirement only applied if notice of probate proceedings had been properly given. In this case, he believed such notice was lacking and thus did not trigger any deadline for filing claims against Chapman’s estate. He also disagreed with how his colleagues interpreted certain provisions in Tennessee statutes related to banking operations and insolvency procedures which they used as grounds for their ruling.