Legal Blog

Ticket Cases

Are the ticket cases still alive and well? Just in case you forgot your 1^st year law school contracts course, the moral of the story in ticket cases is that when given a ticket by a parking lot or a ski hill attendant or signing a contract from, say, a car rental company, never read it. It will only limit liability when you do not want liability to be limited. The latest ticket case is Best v. Deal [2006] O.J. No. 4313 (SCJ).

Golf Anyone?

The groom, his father, and six other friends were celebrating the upcoming nuptials with a game of golf. They were playing on a course that they knew well. The father sprung for the green fees and the cart rentals. The plaintiff was in a cart driven by one of his six friends. The cart hit some gravel on a steep pitch, tipped over, and injured the plaintiff, resulting in damages that the parties to the action ultimately agreed were worth $60,000.

The rental form for the cart and the receipt for the green fees each contained an exclusion of liability for the golf club. The plaintiff sued both the driver of the cart and the golf club.

Liability

The judge found that the cart driver was not liable. There was no evidence that he had done anything improper. The judge attributed the accident to the state of the cart path, in particular the existence of gravel on a steep and windy area of the path.

The judge held that the father was not the agent for the plaintiff when the father rented the cart. The plaintiff did not even know that the father was going to rent the cart. Since the plaintiff did not enter into the contracts, they and their exclusion clauses did not bind him.

The judge then referred to Tilden v. Clendenning (1978), 18 O.R. (2d) 601 (C.A.) as authority for the “proposition that a signature can only be relied upon as manifesting assent to a document when it is reasonable for the party relying on it to believe that the signer really did assent to its contents.” In Tilden, the car renter was not bound to an exclusion in the contract because he did not know of it and no one is expected to read this type of contract.

The judge ultimately held that he did not need to decide the ticket issue because he had already determined that the plaintiff had no contract with the golf club. However, the judge did affirm that the ticket cases concept was still alive and well.

Unfortunately, the case did not answer the question that formed in our minds: did the wedding proceed as scheduled?