Opinion

Nash v. Motorola Communications & Electronics, Inc.

  • 96 N.C. App. 329
  • 385 S.E.2d 537
  • 1989 N.C. App. LEXIS 1006
Court
Court of Appeals of North Carolina
Filed
Nov 21, 1989
Status
Published
Author
Phillips
On the bench
Lewis, Phillips, Becton
Cited by
29 cases

explaining that causes of action sounding in fraud accrue "at the time the fraud is discovered or should have been discovered with the exercise of reasonable diligence” (emphasis removed)

How later courts described this case

  • explaining that causes of action sounding in fraud accrue "at the time the fraud is discovered or should have been discovered with the exercise of reasonable diligence” (emphasis removed)
  • holding that a UDTP theory based on fraud accrues when the plaintiff discovered or should have discovered the fraud
  • holding UDTP claims based on fraud accrue “at the time the fraud is discovered or should have been discovered with the exercise of reasonable diligence.”
  • Statute of limitation for fraud under unfair trade practices act is tolled until “the time the fraud is discovered or should have been discovered with the exercise of reasonable diligence.”

Written by the judges who cited it.

The opinion

Judge PHILLIPS

concurring in the result.

I concur only in the result of the majority opinion. The reason the statute of limitations did not start to run until the Federal Communications Commission made plaintiffs stop operating their business, in my opinion, is that before then plaintiffs had not been damaged, had nothing to sue about, and an action would have been dismissible on its face. And whether plaintiffs ought to have known before then that the FCC could prevent them from operating as planned is immaterial since the record does not suggest, much less establish, that the ways of the FCC about matters of this kind are so predictable that communications law specialists, much less ordinary businessmen, should have known that the Commission would ban the activity involved. Instead, the record suggests that in opening, closing, or otherwise regulating the airways the FCC has the discretion to make and does make all kinds of exceptions and that its policies and practices can be as important to those *333 subject to them as the wording of a regulation. Thus, whether defendants represented that they knew that the FCC’s policy was not to forbid operations like plaintiffs’, and whether plaintiffs had a right to rely thereon are issues of fact that the judge had no authority to decide.

This is a copy of a public record, reproduced as it was published. It is not legal advice, and it may not be the version a court would rely on. Check the official source before you cite it.

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