Bash v. Bell Telephone Co.

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that to be construed as a tort, the wrong ascribed to defendant must be the gist of the action, the contract being collateral
• holding that an agent for a disclosed principal is not personally liable unless agent agreed to liability in the principal’s contract
• stating “[t]o permit a promisee to sue his promisor in tort for breaches of contract inter se would erode the usual rules of contractual recovery and inject confusion into our well settled forms of actions”
• affirming the dismissal of a negligent claim because the “the parties’ obligations are defined by the terms of the contract, and not by the larger social policies embodied in the law of torts.”
• “an unperformed promise does not give rise to a presumption that the promisor intended not to perform when the promise was made”
• “[C]ontract[] actions lie only for breaches and duties imposed by mutual consensus agreements between particular individuals[.]”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).