Court Opinion

ID: 9643350
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 20:26:53.926871+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:59.776190
License: Public Domain

L. HAND, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
If the plaintiff had known, when the contract was made, that the defendant had already consented to take out warrants under the Act, I should agree that the case fell within the well-settled doctrine of the Kronprinzessin Cecile ;* because, although the defendant was not absolutely prevented from lifting the copra, the reprisals to which it would have subjected itself, if it did, were so serious that they would have excused performance. The 'basis of such an excuse is stated in the opinion of Holmes, J., in the case I have just cited: performance is excused, when “it cannot be believed that the contractee would 'have demanded or the contractor would have assumed” the risks which it entails. The course of the law away from an unyielding adherence to the literal meaning of the words, is no different in the case of contracts from its course in other legal transactions. As courts become increasingly sure of themselves, interpretation more and more involves an imaginative projection of the expressed purpose upon situations arising later, for which the parties did not provide and which they did not have in mind. Out of the rivers of ink that have been spilled upon that subject I know nothing that has emerged which enlightens us beyond the caution that departure from the text—necessary as it is—must always be made with circumspection.
It is an obvious corollary of such a canon of interpretation that the risks which the promisor would have insisted that he should not be obliged to accept, and which the promisee would have agreed that he need not, must be the same. And it follows that, when the promisor offers as an excuse a burden upon his performance which he did not provide against, he must be content to 'have the question decided 'by the facts that both he and the promisee knew in common when the contract was made. For instance, although a promise to perform personal service is excusable by the death of the promisor, it would not be so, if the promisor knew that his death was imminent. For this reason in the case at 'bar the defend*703ant’s excuse is to be judged as though it had not in fact consented to take out warrants for all its ships; and, while I agree that we cannot say affirmatively that our entrance into the war would not in that case have excused the defendant’s performance, this record does not satisfy me that it would. True, the plaintiff did urge upon the Commission that a cancellation of its contract would involve it in loss, and the Commission was obdurate; but, the defendant was in a much weaker position to press such a claim 'because of its consent. Perhaps it would not have been successful had it not consented; but I do not see how we can say that a priori. After all, although it was at the time a feeble government in exile, it represented a friendly power and an ally, which by hypothesis had not yet agreed to pool its many ships; and surely it would have been highly desirable to us that it should do so voluntarily. I do not suggest that the Commission could not have forced it to comply, but I do suggest that it might have thought that less than one third the cargo space of the “Tropic Seas” was not a stake which would have justified coercive measures, while the defendant’s consent still remained in abeyance; or indeed a stake which, all things considered, would have justified even a request to repudiate its contract with the plaintiff. Whether such a request unaccompanied by any intimation of coercion would have been an excuse is a question which I am not prepared to answer, and it is not necessary to do so, since my views are not to prevail.
Therefore, I think that the defendant had the burden of proving either (1) that the Commission would have coerced or at least would have requested the defendant to repudiate its contract; or (2) that the plaintiff would have engaged the space in the “Tropic Seas,” even if it 'had known that the defendant had already consented to take out warrants for its ships. Strictly, we might therefore affirm the judgment because of this failure in the proof; but that I think would be scarcely just, for the trial was not conducted on any such theory. I would therefore reverse the judgment; but, instead of dismissing the complaint I would remand the cause for a new trial.

 244 U.S. 12, 37 S.Ct. 490, 491, 61 L.Ed. 960.