Court Opinion

ID: 9590927
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:59:44.960647+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:01:07.110408
License: Public Domain

Stukes, Justice
(dissenting).
I regret to have to dissent from the judgment of the Court in this case. I think equity and good conscience require affirmance of the trial court.
There is no dispute as to the law. The question to answer is whether the facts make sufficient excuse for the failure of the attorney to find the optionor during the last two days of the thirty-day option period. I think they do.
The real effect of the decision is to reduce the thirty-day option to one for twenty-eight days. During the last two days of the option period the optionor was admittedly available only a few hours during Saturday afternoon when it is common knowledge that law offices are usually closed; and this was Saturday afternoon of the Labor Day holiday weekend. Again, it is common knowledge that all who can at that season trek to the beaches for week-ends from nearby Conway, which was the home of the parties to the option. This the optionor and the attorney for the assignee of the optionee did on this occasion.
The optionor’s effort to find the attorney at his office on Saturday afternoon when there was no answer tó the telephone and the door was locked should have been obviously *534useless. The letter which he then wrote and held to mail until the following Monday morning was likewise a vain gesture. If he had deliberately secreted himself from Friday morning until Saturday noon, he could not have more successfully evaded the efforts of the optionee’s attorney to reach him. He had no office and apparently the only person at his home knew only that he had left on Friday morning with a suitcase for an undisclosed destination and on a trip of unknown duration.
I do not think that a court of equity should, in such a situation as the evidence discloses, countenance the avoidance of an obligation. The extended litigation indicates that the rights at stake are valuable. And I do not think that the cited decisions require it. On the contrary Shannon v. Freeman, 117 S. C. 480, 109 S. E. 406, tends otherwise. It involved a contract to sell rather than an option, as here, but it expressly provided that time was of the essence so the applicable rule should be the same.
That other courts of equity of sensitive conscience would follow the course I advocate in this case is indicated by the annotation in 157 A. L. R. 1311 which follows report of the well-considered Pennsylvania decision of Unatin 7-up Co. v. Solomon, 350 Pa. 632, 39 A. (2d) 835. See also especially the cases collected under the subtitle, “Absence or evasive conduct,” 157 A. L. R. 1318 et seq.