Court Opinion

ID: 9611317
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 03:55:11.871155+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:03:13.029357
License: Public Domain

*14NEWMAN, J.
I dissent. The Chancery Court in England sometimes created rights, sometimes remedies. When California courts decide whether a jury trial should be assured, I believe that they should focus not on rights but on remedies. A plaintiff who seeks damages should be entitled to a jury. One who seeks specific performance or an injunction or quiet title, etc. (plus supplementary damages or “damages in lieu” that would have been allowed in Chancery) is not entitled to a jury.
The majority opinion here discusses “promissory estoppel,” “equitable estoppel,” “equitable principles,” “equitable doctrine,” “equitable nature,” and even “injustice.” To pretend that words like those enable us to isolate “ordinary common-law rights cognizable in courts of law” or that “the gist of the action” governs (quoting from People v. One 1941 Chevrolet Coupe (1951) 37 Cal.2d 283, 299 [231 P.2d 832]) seems to me to be uninstructive fictionalizing. We are told that courts deal with “a purely historical question, a fact which is to be ascertained like any other social, political or legal fact” (id., at p. 287). Yet how often, I wonder, do (or should) California judges instead decide whether the wisdom of a Corbin, in 1963, outweighs comments by Ames, Seavey, Shattuck, and Williston written during the period from 1888 to 1957?
In fact, most rights that are now enforced via a juiy were created not by courts but by legislatures. We look at the remedy sought, not at the judicial or legislative histoiy of the right, to decide whether the trial is to be “legal” or “equitable.” There are troubling borderlines, but the basic rule should be that no jury is required when plaintiff seeks equitable relief rather than “legal” damages. That approach requires no complex, historical research regarding when and by whom certain rights were created. It also requires less reliance on the anomalies of England’s unique juridical history. Courts thus may focus on a basic policy concern; that is, the typically more continuing and more personalized involvement of the trial judge in specific performance and injunctive decrees than in mere judgments for damages.
The doctrine of promissory estoppel was not, I suggest, “developed to provide a remedy (namely, enforcement of a gratuitous promise)” as the majority here contend. What it really did was to help create a new right *15(just as statutes help create new rights) that apparently, but only if we reject what seems to have been Corbin’s view, was enforced as of 1850 in Chancery but not at common law.
Plaintiff in this case sought damages for an alleged breach of contract. He did not seek equitable relief. Thus defendant should have been granted the jury trial he requested.
Bird, C. J., concurred.