Court Opinion

ID: 9614992
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 04:30:12.800492+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:03:41.198061
License: Public Domain

*876Sognier, Chief Judge,
dissenting.
It is my belief that in the first appearance of this case before us, this court issued an opinion which contained an ambiguity in the phrase used to measure damages. However, although our language was inapt, it need not cause an unjust result because, being ambiguous, it is susceptible to construction following established principles of contract interpretation. That is what the court did on remand in the very well-reasoned case of Arthur Treacher’s &c. v. Chillum Terrace &c. Partnership, 347 A2d 568 (Md. 1975), where the identical language was used in an initial opinion setting the measure of damages for the anticipatory breach of a lease for a restaurant which was to have been renovated to the proposed lessee’s specifications. See Arthur Treacher’s &c. v. Chillum Terrace &c. Partnership, 327 A2d 282 (Md. 1974). When on remand the Maryland trial court interpreted that language to contemplate using the rental value that the completed, renovated space would have brought at the time of the breach, the Maryland Court of Appeals then held that was proper, because to hold otherwise would render the language in its original opinion “implausible if not absurd,” id. at 571, there being “no evidence of a market of lessees who would rent vacant land.” Id.
We should now use the same established principles of contract interpretation to avoid an “implausible if not absurd” result. For that reason, I concur fully in the dissent of Judge Pope.