Barclays Bank Delaware v. Bamford

Citations

• 213 Conn. App. 1

Syllabus

The plaintiff bank sought to recover damages for the defendant's breach of a credit card agreement, claiming that the defendant had defaulted on a credit card account. The trial court granted the plaintiff's motion for default for failure to disclose a defense, pursuant to the relevant rule of practice (§ 13-19), and rendered judgment thereon following a hearing in damages. During the proceedings, the defendant filed a motion to disqualify the trial judge, F, from further participation in the proceedings on the ground of impropriety, which the trial court denied. On appeal to this court, the defendant claimed, inter alia, that the trial court improp- erly denied the motion to disqualify. Held: 1. The trial court did not abuse its discretion in denying the defendant's motion to disqualify F, the defendant having failed to establish that a reasonable person presented with the facts would doubt F's impartiality; the record demonstrated that the defendant's counsel failed to provide any evidence of bias or impropriety sufficient to meet the required threshold, as counsel's history of past litigation involving F's former law firm and a single conversation with F, both occurring nearly twenty years ago, simply did not put F's impartiality in question. 2. The trial court properly granted the plaintiff's motion for default for failure to disclose a defense; contrary to the defendant's claim that she had no obligation to disclose a defense because the action did not fit into any of the categories specified under Practice Book § 13-19, this court determined that, for the purposes of § 13-19, the complaint, which sounded in default on a credit account, constituted an action ''upon [a] written contract'' within the meaning of § 13-19, as each credit card transaction was a unilateral promise to repay the debt being incurred, in accordance with the terms set forth in the credit card agreement, in exchange for the issuing bank's performance. 3. The trial court did not abuse its di