Court Opinion

ID: 9885577
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-10-06 13:07:41.41602+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:48:55.133380
License: Public Domain

*341Desmond, J.
(dissenting). The suit is for moneys due under an oral agreement, and defendants have been awarded summary judgment of dismissal, on motion, on the ground that the complaint shows on its face that the agreement sued upon is one which the Statute of Frauds makes unenforcible. For our purposes, the allegations of the complaint are, of course, taken as being true, and so we are limited to the legal question of the enforcibility, under the statute, of the particular contract which the complaint asserts and describes. That such a contract may be invalid for some other reason (such as lack of mutuality of obligation) is beside the point, and beside the point, too, is the fact that there would be no obligation on defendants- to pay anything unless and until there were entered into between the parties separate sales transactions whereby plaintiff chose to give defendants, and defendants chose to accept, orders for gasoline. Plaintiff claims under one definite, described, contract whereby, according to plaintiff the parties agreed orally that, so long as plaintiff should purchase from certain oil purchasers, but through defendants, plaintiff’s requirements of gasoline, and so long as defendants should accept those orders, defendants would pay plaintiff a certain commission or discount, equal to that received from the producers by defendants, on the quantities of gasoline so purchased by plaintiff. If that oral contract so set forth by plaintiff is, in law, one which ‘ ‘ By its terms is not to be performed within one year ” (Personal Property Law, § 31, subd. 1), then the complaint was properly dismissed.
Regardless of whether, or when, plaintiff gave, or defendants accepted, any orders for gasoline, plaintiff’s right to give such orders and defendants’ obligation to pay the agreed amount if it accepted any of them, would, by the terms of that treaty, continue for an indefinite time. There was nothing that either party could do, within a year, or within any other agreed-upon period, to bring the arrangement to an end. Putting that in another way: plaintiff, into the indefinite future, would have the right to place orders and collect the discount if any of the orders was accepted, and there was nothing defendants could do, within a year from the making of the deal, to discharge and terminate its obligation. The agreement, therefore, was one, *342which under the rule of Cohen v. Bartgis Bros. Co. (289 N. Y. 846), and Martocci v. Greater New York Brewery (301 N. Y. 57), was unenforcible because it was not put in writing.
The judgment should be affirmed, with costs.
Lewis, Dye and Froessel, JJ., concur with Conway, J.; Desmond, J., dissents in opinion in which Loughran, Ch. J., and Fuld, J., concur.
Judgment accordingly.