# Nash v. Motorola Communications & Electronics, Inc.

> Court of Appeals of North Carolina · November 21, 1989 · 96 N.C. App. 329

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9570945

## Case

- **Full name:** Claude E. Nash and Janis Wessolleck v. Motorola Communications and Electronics, Inc., Charles Robinson, Motorola, Inc. and Aircall, Inc.
- **Court:** Court of Appeals of North Carolina
- **Decided:** November 21, 1989
- **Citations:** 96 N.C. App. 329; 385 S.E.2d 537; 1989 N.C. App. LEXIS 1006
- **Precedential status:** Published
- **Opinion:** Concurrence by Phillips
- **Judges:** Lewis, Phillips, Becton
- **Cited by:** 29 later opinions in the Frix Law Library

## Citator (automated)

- No negative treatment found by the automated citator. That is not the same as a confirmation that the case is good law; read the citing cases.
- Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9570945

## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction)

- 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.”

## Opinion text

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.

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Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9570945. Public record. Not legal advice.