Pantuso Motors, Inc. v. Corestates Bank

How courts have described this case

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

• declining to hold that “a remedy which the General Assembly has specifically designated as liquidated damages is in fact a [civil] penalty or forfeiture”
• defining a penalty clause as “not [a] pre-estimate of probable actual damages, but [a] punishment, the threat of which is designed to prevent the breach.”
• defining liquidated damages as “the sum a party to a contract agrees to pay if he breaks some promise, and which, having been arrived at by a good faith effort to estimate in advance the actual damage that will probably ensue from the breach, is legally recoverable . . . if the breach occurs.”
• “A penalty . . . is fixed, ‘not as a pre-estimate of probable actual damages, but as a punishment, the threat of which is designed to prevent the breach.’”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).