So there I was, minding my own business, dutifully doing practice bar exam questions, when I come across this one:
When Sandra graduated from high school, her elderly Aunt Mildred asked her to come and live with her in the large, three-story brownstone owned by Mildred in Manhattan. Mildred . . . needed assistance in caring for the several thousand orchids she cultivated in her rooftop greenhouse [and orally promised Sandra that she would leave Sandra everything if Sandra came and helped her].
At which point I put a little (!) in the margin.
Two paragraphs later, I read
Mildred had devised her orchids to a Nero Wolfe, also residing in Manhattan, and [everything else to Mildred’s daughter]. When Sandra refused to vacate the brownstone or surrender the orchids, Cramer, now representing Mildred’s daughter, brought action for possession of the house.
Which, clearly, was A Sign that it was time for me to take a break and write up the most recent Wolfe anthology I’d read, Three Doors to Death. (Or maybe I was just sick of law. The last days of studying for the bar exam seem to consist, for me, of wild veering between confidence, panicked despair, and being so sick of law as to not care any more. Never fear, I’m not going to chuck it all; I will be brief.) Alas, these are not actual New York bar questions, but ones written by a bar review course.
Three Doors to Death is far more satisfactory than Trouble in Triplicate, fortunately. Ignoring the slightly awkward introductory note, it opens with “Man Alive,” in which a man who faked his suicide comes back to life and is promptly murdered (of course). It features a truly lovely bit of pure deduction by Wolfe, who figures out the solution and browbeats proof out of a witness in something like half an hour, with impressively little in the way of facts to go on. We are also given Archie’s age: 32 in 1947; that would make him sixty in the last book, A Family Affair, published in 1975. He’s a very sprightly sexagenarian . . .
In “Omit Flowers,” the second story, a once-brilliant cook has been charged with murder, and Marko Vukcic has enlisted his friend Nero to get him cleared. It has a great Archie-being-clever section, which makes up for the forced title, and the very Archie line,
Never to find yourself in a situation where you have to enter a big department store is one of the minor reasons for not getting married. I guess it would also be a reason for not being a detective.
(I was moderately traumatized by the whole wedding registry experience.)
The last story, “Door to Death,” is in my opinion only so-so. It takes considerably less genius to solve a murder by poking a stick into an ant hill, and I’m not as amused as I used to be by Wolfe’s reaction to the outdoors. I was interested to note that it isn’t just Wolfe who believes in keeping people in the dark, though. For all that Archie bitches when Wolfe won’t tell him what’s going on, he was perfectly happy to leave us unenlightened about the plan until it was executed. Not that there’s very much suspense about what’s going to happen, but I found it amusing nevertheless.
Oh, in case you’re wondering: the answer was “C”, “The Statute of Frauds will not bar enforcement of Mildred’s promise because her promise induced Sandra to perform, and injustice can be avoided only by enforcement.” Right—back to the grind.
So I’m not sure I understand completely, here: Sandra got to keep the house and the orchids, even though the written will conflicted with an oral promise?
Was the oral promise granted more weight because Sandra had clearly done actions that she would not have done had the promise not existed?
Yup–promissory estoppel means basically that even though you don’t have a valid contract [*], you can still get something. Loosely, you need to have been promised something that could reasonably be expected to cause you to do something serious, and then you actually did the something. It would be unfair for the person making the promise to say–whoops, sorry, I lied, tough luck. Sometimes you only get fair value of services or enough to keep the other person from being unjustly enriched; but here, it’s hard to put a value on what Sandra did (I elided some of the details), so the court will go for specific performance, that is, enforce precisely what Mildred promised.
[*] There’s no valid contract because contracts to make a will (“I, M, promise to leave S everything”) have to be in writing. That’s the reference to the Statute of Frauds.
I wish I got to use words like estoppel on a daily basis.
(Thanks. It seems there’s a great con in this idea, somehow, waiting to be found…)
Let’s hear it for detrimental reliance!
Just curious, was this a Wills question (sounds like) or a Contracts question (could be)?
Nathan–But you get to play with lasers on a daily basis… And yeah, you could probably get a con out of it, but remember that you have to prove the existence of the promise, too, and that can be tricky. For instance, in some states, there are rules [quaintly known as “Dead Man Statutes”] about testifying about your interactions with dead people, for just that reason. Sandra’s probably okay; putting NY’s Dead Man Statute aside (it’s not entirely clear to me that it would apply here, for fiddly reasons that you all don’t care about), there’s no reason that she would have moved in with her aunt unless her aunt had made this promise, since they weren’t apparently close. And the whole point of promissory estoppel is that it’s to keep unfairness at bay, which I’m sure makes the courts sensitive to the possibility of scams. It’s probably easier to convince someone to make a will in your favor, frankly.
Trent–it was a contracts question; Sandra wasn’t trying to contest the will.
Anyway, how about that Nero Wolfe?
>>>We are also given
Archie’s age: 32 in 1947; that would make him sixty in the last book, A Family Affair, published in 1975. He’s a very
sprightly sexagenarian . . .
*g* In “A Family Affair,” Archie at one point comments that he’s starting to “feel [his] age.” Made me laugh; I love the tongue-in-cheek mentions of his and Wolfe’s continued youth. And I get a huge kick out of the way “A Right to Die” mischievously acts as if there’s nothing strange whatsoever about the fact that their visitor has aged almost 40 years but they haven’t….
Correcting you to be polite–it’s actually more like 26 years from Too Many Cooks to A Right to Die, but yes, in some ways that’s one of the most surreal moments in the series.
The TV series is even stranger, to me, in this regard. Frankly, when we first started watching the show, I expected them to put them all in a generic 1950s setting and avoid the stories set in specific periods, to avoid this problem. I mean, it’s one thing to read stories set in WWII and the ’60s, and another to see Archie in uniform one episode and in dubious pastel suits (not to mention Lily Rowan in a beehive!) in another, while none of them look a day older…
Wow, Kate.
It’s not everday that someone manages to weave a practice bar exam question into a booklog and then have it generate several volleys of comments. All I know is that reading that question made my eyes glaze over and made me retract into a fetal position, reminding me of exactly how much you are forced to digest for the bar, only to then have it slip completely from your mind.
(Statute of Frauds… I know I *used* to know what the heck that was…..)
p.s. Wipe the floor with the bar examiners this week. Good luck.
Thanks, Rich. Sorry to make your eyes glaze over–I guess contracts aren’t a real focus of life as a prosecuting attorney…
I’m half tempted to start writing up, on spoiler-marked pages, just what’s wrong with legal things in books I read, the way Findlaw does for TV shows. However, I suspect it might end up being too much work, especially with things like the Nero Wolfe books where the law has undoubtedly changed a lot since then.
Anyway. One more day of studying, silly kung fu movie tonight, and then tomorrow…
Interesting — so what’s to prevent me from going to the courts and claiming that I was made promises when I wasn’t, to try and get things?
Haven’t had much reading time lately, but Nicole and I are becoming fans of the A&E show….
Well, you have to prove it.
Someone on rec.arts.sf.fandom is reporting that there’s reasonably good confirmation that A&E is planning not to produce any more new episodes, which I hope turns out not to be the case. We watched a taped copy of The Silent Speaker one of the nights before the bar and I almost hurt myself laughing–they don’t always nail it (and they didn’t quite get right the last scene), but when they’re on, they’re on.