Opinion ID: 654607
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Part Performance Doctrine and Waiver.

Text: 35 The district court concluded that Butler waived any appeal to the part performance doctrine by failing properly to present this issue first to the bankruptcy court. 21 In contending that the district court erred in finding waiver, Butler asserts that it did raise this doctrine in a response to a motion for summary judgment. According to Butler, this doctrine was presented by implication through the cases Butler cited to the bankruptcy court in connection with that motion. We find Butler's argument too thin to bear the weight of its contention. 36 Citing cases that may contain a useful argument is simply inadequate to preserve that argument for appeal; to be preserved, an argument must be pressed, and not merely intimated. 22 In short, the argument must be raised to such a degree that the trial court may rule on it 23 --a standard that clearly was not met in the instant case. The argument here was not even identified by name, much less advocated. 37 Butler's case-cite-as-argument rationale is even more dubious when viewed in the context within which the case citations were made. Butler cited these cases in connection with its advocacy of the theory that full performance by the parties took this oral guaranty out of the Statute of Frauds and thus made it enforceable. That full performance removes an agreement from the aegis of the Statute of Frauds is true. 24 But this maxim is not relevant to the issue at hand. Rather, the bankruptcy court had to determine whether the oral guaranty was enforceable at the time the payments were made to determine whether those payments constituted reasonably equivalent value under Sec. 548. Butler's misdirected appeal to a doctrine applicable only after those payments were made could hardly have provided the bankruptcy court with notice that Butler intended to invoke the part performance doctrine--one that, as noted, applies when ascertaining enforceability of the guaranty at the time those payments were made. 25 III