Court Opinion

ID: 9549175
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 18:14:28.759401+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:19:57.008818
License: Public Domain

HENRIOD, Chief Justice
(dissenting).
I have considerable difficulty in not concurring with the main opinion, — or at least in the result. Nonetheless, I think the trial court was on solid ground by indicating that without a tender back of the $12,000 received, the plaintiff was not entitled to move ahead with his litigation. The evidence is without doubt that the plaintiff .accepted an $84,000 check to settle one type •of liability and a $12,000 check for another type, covered by different companies. It :seems significant that he cashed the big •one immediately, but held the little one for nine days before he cashed it. His whole theory was that because he needed the $12,000 right now, because of necessitous circumstances, he was impelled or rforced to accept it through economic coercion of defendant. In waiting nine days, without any tender back because of prior duress of defendant, then deliberately cashing it and using the proceeds, does not bespeak a lack of mutuality in measuring the length of the Chancellor’s foot.
Plaintiff never did tender this money before, at the inception of, or during a protracted discovery procedure that culminated in a pretrial conference. Then the trial of this case became a matter of immediacy. At this juncture the trial court inquired simply if the plaintiff had tendered back the $12,000 to which plaintiff said, “No,” and gave as an excuse that he didn’t think he had to, since he believed he could simply hold it in reduction of his claim.
This contention assumes that the court or jury had to find, without question, that his claim would be in excess of $12,000. The insurance company and the trial court took umption with such conclusive assumption or presumption.
The main opinion cites Coke v. Timby to support its contention that a tender was not necessary. Aside from some dictum to the effect that in another case one who could not read or write English, and wouldn’t know what he had signed anyway, would not be charged with a tender, the law of the Timby case was to the effect that a tender was made in court and refused, hence the condition precedent was *218inoperative. The main opinion here then cites the McLaughlin case in support of its conclusion. That case simply cited the Timby case to support a rule foreign to and not warranted by the main opinion’s conclusion here. The opinion also cites Sec. 480, Restatement of Contracts. Doing so, it ignores the language which says, “The power of any party * :|! * to avoid a transaction for fraud or misrepresentation is conditional on an offer made promptly after acquiring knowledge (thereof) to return the amount of any money * * * received.” Then, in a subsection upon which the main opinion relies, it excepts the case where “it is merely money paid, the amount of which can be credited in partial cancellation of the injured party’s claim.”
The main opinion, I think, has misread the whole of Sec. 480. The meat of it is that you must tender the money back before any amount involved will have been determined in futuro, which is the case here, but that the subsection about crediting an amount received in diminution of the injured party’s claim, assumes that such injured party’s claim has been determined in praesenti. Any other interpretation of Sec. 480 would attribute to its authors an affinity for inconsistency.
I take exception to the main opinion’s implication that the trial court decreed as it did on grounds other than lack of tender and hence such position was moot. I got the distinct impression from reading the record that this very circumstance was the concessum of the trial court.
The statement in the main opinion that the matter of tender was moot, quoting a colloquy, is accurate because such mootness was apparent and controlling because of the trial court’s accurate recognition of the law in contradiction to this court’s inaccurate, sloughing off a legal concept with the easy, acrobatic, aphoristic superficiality that “the paramount objective is always to do justice” and therefore something that rightly should be “moot” is now “unmoot.”' The defendants and the trial court apparently felt that justice had been effected before this cburt started quoting scripture. I think the trial court mooted this case out on stare decisis and simple principles of equity, proven by the very citations adverted to in the main opinion.
It is significant that no tender was made even after the colloquy adverted to, so far as the record here reflects, and that the position of plaintiff was provoked by the same kind of error indulged by the main opinion in lifting out of context a subsection of Sec. 480 of the Restatement.