acknowledging the well established principle that municipalities are not immune from estoppel
How later courts described this case
- acknowledging the well established principle that municipalities are not immune from estoppel
- "the government cannot be subject to the acts of its agents and employees if those acts are outside the agent's powers, in violation of positive law, or acts that require legislative or executive action."
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Judge Richardson
in his dissenting opinion aptly said: “There is nothing sacred in the word ‘consent’ and any verdict, like any other contract, may be attacked and set aside if fraudulent; but there is a great difference in the position of an assignee who has relied upon a certificate of the person charged with the payment of a debt that he has no defense to it, and an assignee who has failed to require such a certificate before purchasing the claim. If the Trust Company had not secured the certificate of the solicitor that the verdict was final, it would have been subject to every defense which the City could interpose against Mabel Ervin. ... I can see no difference between a certificate that no appeal will be taken from a verdict consented to, and a verdict arrived at after a hotly contested case, so far as concerns an innocent purchaser thereof who has no knowledge of any defects in the consummation of the agreement which gave rise to the verdict.”
When there are circumstances seemingly giving rise to an estoppel by one who has acted to his detriment by acting on another’s assurance by word or conduct, the question usually resolves itself into this: Does right and justice require it? * Whether an estoppel will be *256 applied depends on the facts and circumstances of the particular case. To vacate the verdict in this case to the great loss of the Trust Company, which took an assignment of it on good faith and paid full value for it, would be an act of injustice. It was the city which long acquiesced in the practice of permitting its Solicitor to consent to verdicts against it when settlements had been agreed to by the opposing parties. It was the city which failed to supervise the actions of its public servant.
We also think the instant case is one for the application of the rule that “where one of two innocent persons must suffer loss for the fraud of a third, the loss should fall on the one whose act facilitated it.” In Fifth St. B. & L. Assn. v. Kornfeld et al., 315 Pa. 406, 414 , 172 A. 703 , we said, quoting from an English case: “Neglect [sufficient to warrant the application of the rule] must be in the transaction itself, and be the proximate cause of leading the party into that mistake, and also must be the neglect of some duty that is owing to the person led into that belief, or what comes to the same thing, to the general public, of whom that person is one.” Here the city’s default or neglect occurred in the very transaction in question; it was the neglect of a duty owing to the Trust Company and the general public and was the proximate cause of leading the other party into something to its possible detriment.
The order of the court below is reversed and the verdict is reinstated.
See Dillon on Municipal Corporations, 5th ed., Vol. 3, p. 1900, sec. 1194.