0 0
Superior Court of Pennsylvania - 161 A. 571, 105 Pa. Super. 579
In a 1932 case called Langer v. Superior Steel Corp., the Pennsylvania Superior Court decided that if a retiring employee agrees not to work for a competitor, and the employer promises to pay them a pension, there is a valid contract with legal consideration. The case happened when an employee sued his former employer for not paying the promised pension. His employer argued there was no contract because the employee did not give any consideration.
The trial court sided with the employer, but on appeal, the decision was reversed. The court said there was a valid contract between the parties because consideration can be either a benefit for the person making the promise or a detriment to the person receiving it. The court found that the employee's promise not to work for a competitor was enough of a detriment to be considered consideration.
The court rejected the employer's argument that it did not get any benefit from the employee's promise, stating that a contract doesn't need to show actual benefit, as long as something was promised, done or given up by the person receiving the promise at the request of the person making it.
This case is significant because it helps define consideration in contract law and shows how courts look at consideration as a key part of a valid contract. It also highlights the importance of the parties' intentions rather than their subjective opinions on what is a benefit or a detriment.
The plaintiff is seeking damages for breach of contract in a case of assumpsit. The defendant made monthly pension payments for four years but then stopped. The lower court ruled in favor of the defendant based on questions of law raised by them. The issue is whether the letter in question created a gratuitous promise or an enforceable contract. To determine if a contract was created, it must be based on a consideration, which is something of value given in exchange for a promise. The court below held that there was not enough consideration in the case because the plaintiff was not obligated to refrain from seeking other employment or continuing loyalty to the defendant. However, an agreement is not invalid for lack of consideration just because one party has an option while the other does not.
LSD+ gives you access to over 50,000 case briefs, more than anyone else. Be the first to email us the website of a case brief product that offers you more case briefs and we'll give you a free year of LSD+.
Unlimited access. Read as much content as you want during your trial with no device limitations. Cancel any time during your trial and keep access for the full 14 days.
Lawyers and judges love to use big words. And Latin, for some reason.
Highlight a legal term in LSD Briefs and get an instant, plain English definition. Try highlighting contract or specific performance. No need to search or read through a list of definitions, simply highlight the words you don’t know and our LSDefine integration will instantly give you a definition to any of over 30,000 legal terms.
DeepDive allows you to explore legal cases like never before. DeepDive offers multiple levels of case summaries, which empowers you to quickly and easily find the information you need to stay on top of readings. Easily navigate through summary levels and click on any text to get more detail, all the way down to the original legal case text.
Our proprietary state-of-the-art system can instantly brief over 6,000,000 US cases. That means we can probably brief that case that your professor assigned last night when she sent you a poorly scanned pdf and told you to read every third paragraph. Or maybe she uploaded it to Canvas and didn’t really tell you to read it, but you know you probably should. Tenure does wild things to good people.
Study groups are a great way to learn and explore a case. LSD has chat rooms for each case to let you ask questions across the community and hear what other students struggled with and how they put it all together. Learn the key points of every case from other LSD+ users and share your knowledge with LSD High Points.
Don’t settle for mistakes in briefs that have been there for 10 years and never fixed. Find an issue or something missing from a brief? Down vote and we will make improvements. All of our case brief editors graduated from from T14 law schools.