The BUSKLAW Newsletter

Picasso's famous (and now priceless) 1905 painting, "The Actor," hangs in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art  but not without some controversy. The estate of the painting's original owners, Paul and Alice Leffmann, sued the Museum in N.Y. Federal Court to get it back, along with $100 million in damages. The basis for the suit: the Leffmanns were German Jews, living under Nazi oppression, who were desperate to obtain the funds to flee to Switzerland (and later to Brazil). So in 1938, they were "forced" to sell the painting for a fraction of its value. The Museum defended the suit by arguing that there was no duress under either New York or Italian law. Judge Loretta Preska weighed the facts, sorted out all of the arguments, and issued her decision on 7 February 2018 .  There is no dispute that the Leffmanns, living in Italy at the time, were under imminent threat of deportation and death at the hands of German Nazis, who were becoming cozy with Mus...

If you work with contracts, it's just a matter of time before a contract with an "unreasonable" provision is sitting on your desk. Perhaps this happened because your company didn't have enough bargaining leverage to get the other party to change the unreasonable provision, but your senior management directed you to proceed anyway. Or maybe the unreasonable provision snuck in during the heat of contract negotiation and wasn't noticed until months later. In any event, you're thinking about going to court and arguing that the unreasonable provision should be disregarded (or even invalidate the contract). What are your chances?  In Michigan, you'll have an uphill battle, as the plaintiffs found out in the case of Rory v Continental Insurance Company CNA that was decided by the Michigan Supreme Court in 2005 and, to my knowledge, is still good law.  The contract at issue was an auto insurance policy issued by Continental to Rory. (Yes, an insurance polic...