Discussion Board 4
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School
Old Dominion University *
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Course
412
Subject
Law
Date
Feb 20, 2024
Type
docx
Pages
2
Uploaded by CountIce11231
Success in business and in life requires the development of critical thinking skills. Critical thinking requires the ability to understand what someone is saying and then to ask specific questions that enables you to evaluate the quality of the reasoning offered to support ideas, decisions and advice. Critical thinking enables you to weigh the relative worth of alternative courses of action. Critical thinking combined with ethical reasoning helps you make better choices and decisions. There is an eight step process that you can use to analyze the legal cases in this course. The process is as follows:
1. What are the facts?
2. What is the issue?
3. What are the reasons and conclusions?
4. What are the relevant rules of law?
5. Does the legal argument contain significant ambiguity?
6. What ethical norms are fundamental to the decision?
8. Is there relevant missing information?
The ethical norms that influence a judge's decisions are justice, stability, freedom, fairness and efficiency.
Utilizing the process above you by the judge, analyze the following fact pattern and decide who should win the case and why.
Smith and his adult son live in a house owned by Smith. At the request of the son, Brown painted
the house. Smith did not authorize the work, but he knew Brown was painting the house and raised no objections. When Brown presented Smith with an invoice for the painting job, Smith refused to pay. Smith argued that he had not contracted to have the house painted. Brown brought a lawsuit against Smith to collect the reasonable value of the work he had done. There is a precedent that when a homeowner allows work to be done on his home by a person who would ordinarily expect to be paid, a duty to pay exists
In the scenario presented Brown, the painter, performed work that was authorized by the owner’s
son but never formally entered into an agreement with the owner, Smith. The issue here is that since Smith never entered into a formal agreement with Brown, Smith asserted that he was not liable to pay for the work that was performed and completed by Brown. However, Brown asserted that despite not entering a formal agreement with Smith, the owner, they entered into an agreement with the owner’s son and as they performed the work, Smith, was aware of it and did not object thus Brown continued and completed the work.
The rule of law that can be applied here is under the concept of contract law, more specifically, quasi-contract law. This is where an obligation is imposed by law to prevent one party from being unjustly enriched at the expense of another party. Given that this form of law exists and is typically upheld in court there is no reason to believe that Brown would not be allowed to collect
payment for his services despite never having a formal written contract with Smith. If Smith had
objected to the work being performed by Brown and Brown had completed the work anyway then Smith would likely have a case not to pay but that is not the case here.
The ethical norms that I feel apply in this scenario are justice and fairness. Since Smith effectively allowed the work to be performed which, in essence, formed an implied contract then justice would be served to compel Smith to pay Brown for the work they performed. Fairness applies here as well in that it is fair to both parties that they get what is expected. By not objecting to the work, Smith wanted the house to be painted and Brown performed a service in which there was an expectation for fair compensation for their work.
When I first looked at this scenario the first thing that jumped to my mind was that the contractor
should not expect to be paid since they never entered into a contract. However, once I figured out this applied within contract law, I realized the scenario wasn’t that simple and that in fact, Brown had a case where he was entitled to payment for services rendered despite the absence of a contract with the owner. In this case, since work was authorized by the owner’s son, work was performed with the owner well aware of it occurring, and then work was completed successfully by Brown. In this case, Brown should win the lawsuit against Smith since Smith did not object to the work performed unless Smith can provide ample proof that he did in fact object.
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