Court Opinion

ID: 9569039
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:10:01.052489+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:20:39.697937
License: Public Domain

LEVINE, Justice,
dissenting.
In Delzer v. United Bank, 484 N.W.2d 502 (N.D.1992), I dissented from the majority-decision reversing the trial court’s grant of summary judgment. Athough that case did not deal with the issue of deceit, it did deal with the issue of the alleged oral contract, and I agreed with the trial judge that there was no material issue of fact which required a trial by jury, given the admission by Mr. Delzer, in a letter to his mortgage company, that he and United Bank had agreed, not to a $300,000 loan, but to a $150,000 operating loan with no funds for any cattle purchase.
Needless to say, at trial, the Bank spent a good deal of time cross-examining Mr. Delzer on this letter. As the majority in Delzer, supra, anticipated, the letter was, to say the least, “awkward for the Delzers to explain.” See Delzer, supra at 506. As I read the cold record, the Bank seriously impugned Del-zer’s credibility. On top of that, there were inconsistent statements by Delzer in prior depositions and at trial, all of which the jury heard. So, I can readily understand the jury’s finding, based on its assessment of the credibility of Mr. Delzer, that there was no oral contract between the Delzers and United Bank. I also readily understand the trial judge’s decision that because there was no contract between the parties, the jury’s finding of deceit was illogical and inconsistent.
I have difficulty with the majority opinion because it unsettles what, until now, has been settled law. That law has been incorporated into our pattern jury instructions which have guided trial lawyers and trial judges for a long, long time. In holding those jury instructions inadequate and misleading, the majority, I believe, does real mischief to our law.
The majority’s bottom line is that there is no inconsistency in the verdict because the reason there was no oral contract found by the jury could have been because the jury thought that United Bank “secretly intended not to perform, and therefore there was not an absolute and unqualified acceptance” and so, the jury thought, there was no contract.
Apparently, the use of the phrase in the instruction that “an acceptance must be absolute and unqualified to constitute consent,” somehow made the secret intentions of the parties, rather than their observable conduct and speech, the basis of a finding that a contract was not created. It is difficult for me to understand how anyone, let alone a panel of eight jurors, could so convolute the meaning of plain English. If I offer to buy “A” from you, and you agree to sell me “A” if I will also buy “B”, under the instruction, there is no consent, because there is no absolute and unqualified acceptance by you of my offer to buy “A”. Consequently, there is no contract. The requirement of an absolute and unqualified acceptance has nothing to do with my secret intentions, or yours, and I wonder why anyone would think otherwise. In finding to the contrary, the majority invalidates an instruction that lawyers and judges have long relied on. It is also an instruction that adequately explains the law of contracts. Nothing in the instruction says that contracts may be formed based on secret intentions. To the contrary, the instruction says that the parties “must agree upon the same terms and conditions in the same sense.” That means that an acceptance must comply with the terms of the offer. Greenberg v. Stewart, 236 N.W.2d 862, 868 (N.D.1975).
The instructions given by the trial judge follow numbers 800 and 810 of the North Dakota Civil Pattern Jury Instructions. In No. 810 and in the instruction given by the trial court, it is clearly stated that: “An express contract must be so interpreted as to give effect to the mutual intention of the parties as it existed at the time of contracting, so far as the same is asceHainable and lawful.” (Emphasis mine.) If, perhaps, the jurors were inclined to be as imaginative as the majority hypothesizes, even those iconoclasts would have had to understand the clear direction of the instruction that a contract depends upon the asceHainable mutual intention of the parties. “Ascertain” means *658“to make [a person] certain, sure, or confident”; “to find out or learn for a certainty”; it is synonymous with discover. Webster’s Third New World Internat’l Dictionary, Unabridged, 1971. “Ascertainable” is an adjective which is defined as “capable of being ascertained.” Id. To the extent that the so-called secret intentions of the parties were considered, they could not have been “ascertainable,” that is, made certain, and therefore, could not have been considered as the mutual intention of the parties.
The jury was instructed that the written contract evidencing a loan of $150,000 did not preclude necessarily the alleged separate oral agreement to lend $150,000 for cattle, but that the Delzers had to establish that a separate oral agreement existed for the financing of the purchase of cattle. I agree with the trial judge that, having found no contract for the loan of the $150,000 for cattle, the jury could not have found any promise to lend the extra $150,000, because the promise underlying both the deceit and the contract is the same. The majority is mistaken in its theory that “[t]he jury could ... logically have found that United made certain extra-contractual promises which it did not intend to perform and which did not meet the requirement of an ‘absolute and unqualified’ acceptance.” In a conference in chambers following the conclusion of plaintiffs’ case, plaintiffs’ attorney explained plaintiffs’ deceit claim:
“Well, as we’ve discussed previously, it’s our position that the deceit, if any, comes about on the question of whether or not the bank officers, specifically Mr. Keeley, Mr. Hurdelbrink and Mr. Reno, misled the plaintiffs on November 1 into signing a document that they did sign with a promise to provide cattle that they never intended to comply with, and because of that, they got the Delzers into this loan agreement. And if they made a promise that was relied upon by the Delzers and didn’t intend to do it, that constitutes deceit.”
The only promise that plaintiffs claimed and, therefore, the only promise that counts here is the one allegedly made for the loan of $150,000 for the purchase of cattle, the very promise the jury found was not made.
I would affirm, and so I respectfully dissent.