Court Opinion

ID: 9860582
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 23:26:24.924254+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:16:33.435437
License: Public Domain

CHIEF JUSTICE HARRISON, dissenting: Proximate cause is essential to a private right of action for damages under section 10a(a) of the Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act (815 ILCS 505/10a(a) (West 1996)). Actual reliance by the plaintiff is not. Connick v. Suzuki Motor Co., 174 Ill. 2d 482, 501 (1996). The appellate court correctly applied these concepts to the case before us. See 311 Ill. App. 3d at 892-95. I would therefore affirm that portion of its judgment reversing the circuit court’s order dismissing Oliveira’s complaint for failure to state a cause of action. The majority’s justification for reaching a contrary result is misguided. While it is true that someone must have been deceived in order to sustain a private right of action for damages under the Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act, there is no requirement in the statute that it be the plaintiff. If others were deceived and acted in reliance on the deception in a way that harmed the plaintiff, the plaintiff is entitled to seek recovery for his damages under the Act even if he, himself, was not misled. Our decision in Zekman v. Direct American Marketers, Inc., 182 Ill. 2d 359 (1998), does not hold otherwise. Although we rejected the plaintiffs claim in Zekman on the grounds that he had not been deceived by the defendant telephone company’s actions (Zekman, 182 Ill. 2d at 376), that determination must be read in context. The plaintiff in Zekman was the only consumer involved, and, unlike the plaintiff in the present case, he did not assert that others were misled in a way that harmed him. Accordingly, if he was not deceived and did not act to his detriment on the basis of a deception, then no one did. That being so, there was no need for our court to go further and address the situation alleged in Oliveira’s complaint, namely, that the plaintiffs damages resulted from reliance by third parties on the defendant’s deceptive conduct. In Zekman, there was simply no reliance by anyone. Without that, there could be no possible causal link between the defendant’s actions and the damages the plaintiff sought to recover. The cause of action asserted by Oliveira here does not suffer from the same impediment. According to Oliveira’s complaint, there was reliance on Amoco’s false representations. It came from the gasoline-purchasing public, who believed Amoco’s spurious claims regarding the company’s premium gasoline and bought that gasoline based on those claims. That reliance, and the purchases it induced, resulted in damage to Oliveira by increasing demand for the fuel, thereby driving the cost higher than what he and others would otherwise have had to pay. Accordingly, if the factual allegations in Oliveira’s complaint are true, as we must assume them to be (see Jackson v. South Holland Dodge, Inc., 197 Ill. 2d 39, 44-45 (2001)), there was a direct causal link between Amoco’s misrepresentations and the actual damages Oliveira sustained. That the reliance involved third parties rather than the individual plaintiff himself is a factor that sets Oliveira’s claim apart from others we have considered under the Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act. The novelty of the claim, however, is no reason to turn it aside. Section 11a of the Act (815 ILCS 505/1la (West 1996)) expressly provides that the Act “shall be liberally construed” to effectuate its purposes. We have interpreted this to mean that the Act confers on Illinois courts a clear mandate to utilize the Act to the utmost degree to eradicate all forms of deceptive and unfair business practices and to provide appropriate remedies to defrauded consumers. Warren v. LeMay, 142 Ill. App. 3d 550, 563 (1986). Consistent with these principles, it is incumbent on our court to remain open to innovative applications of the law’s provisions. Consumer fraud takes endless forms, and it is imperative that we interpret the statute in such a way that it remains flexible enough to address new problems as they arise. For the foregoing reasons, I would hold that Oliveira’s complaint was sufficient to allege a private right of action for damages under the Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act and should not have been dismissed on the pleadings. I therefore dissent.