Court Opinion

ID: 9442362
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 18:45:15.915566+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:04.636146
License: Public Domain

L. HAND, Chief Judge
(concurring).
I agree that the judgment should be reversed, but I would go further than my brothers. Upon this record I think that any conclusion would be “clearly erroneous” which did not find that the agreement between the parties was not a contract of sale, and was an employment of the plaintiff to buy the three parcels of skins as the defendants’ agent. Had the case been tried to a jury, I might have had doubt whether it would have been right to direct a verdict; but we have a larger power over the findings of a judge. The letter of September 13, 1946, was entirely plain, and Spiewak did not pretend that he did not understand it as it read. He tried to avoid its effect by swearing that he called up Wolf and complained of its version of the relations between the parties; and that Wolf led him to believe that it was written only as a cover to evade the price regulations then in force. I assume that he wished the judge to understand that the invoices also were prepared in furtherance of the same disreputable scheme.
Not only is that explanation to the last degree improbable, but to advance it as an excuse answers any doubts which might otherwise have lingered in my mind. The stake which the plaintiff had in the ventures was far too little to make it likely that it would expose itself to criminal prosecution. But that aside, if the letter was intended as a mask, it was a masterpiece of deception, for it bears every internal evidence of good *484faith; its composition with the writer’s tongue in his cheek demanded an ingenuity which I should find it hard to impute to men of affairs. Moreover, it is preposterous to suppose that it should have been sent to the defendants without explanation and without prearrangement, although it flatly contradicted the true agreement. The plaintiff must be supposed to have anticipated that Spiewak would at once recognize its false character and appreciate that it was not seriously intended, which, according to his own testimony, he did not do; and, as every one would agree, he would not do. I would not accept such a cock-and-bull story from any one; to me it is apparent that the defendants, finding a losing contract on their hands, were merely trying to repudiate it; and I would direct the district court so to find upon the second trial unless the record were different.