UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, PLAINTIFF-APPELLEE,
v.
SABIN METAL CORPORATION, DEFENDANT-APPELLANT

2d Cir. | 1958-04-14
Nos. 278, Docket 24881
253 F.2d 956 United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (1958) Positive Treatment
Cited by 6 cases

AI-generated. These summaries, headnotes, and key points are machine-generated and may contain errors or omissions. Always verify against the full opinion text below. Not legal advice.


Holding

The court held that expert testimony regarding what constitutes a mistaken bid is not probative of what the government ought to have known, and that the trial court did not err in limiting cross-examination.


Facts & Procedural History

Defendant appealed a judgment for damages arising from repudiating a bid for steel and silver scrap, claiming the bid was based on a mistake as to the…

The full statement of facts, procedural history, and disposition for this case are member content.

Join FLexlaw to unlock all legal intelligence

© FLexlaw, Inc. — AI-generated enrichments are proprietary. All rights reserved.


Opinion of the Court
PER CURIAM.

PER CURIAM.

Defendant appeals from a judgment for the government’s damages arising out of defendant’s repudiation of a bid made by defendant for steel and silver scrap. Defendant claims that its bid was based on a mistake as to the proportion of silver in the scrap and that the government ought to have recognized that such a high bid could only have been the result of a mistake.

We adopt Judge Levet’s findings of fact, discussion and conclusions of law in their entirety. 151 F.Supp. 683.

Among the points raised by appellant which were not discussed by Judge Levet the principal one is the alleged error in the court’s ruling that testimony of an expert in the metal market that he would have known that the bid was so high as to be a mistake was not probative as to what the government ought to have known. This ruling is attacked as laying down one rule for the government and another for private citizens. It had no such effect. The distinction drawn was not between the government and private persons; it was between laymen and experts. What an expert in the scrap metal trade knows about the value of scrap is no measure of the knowledge with which the law ought to charge one whose sales of scrap are made only when new goods in its inventory become obsolete.

Judge Levet sustained objections to defendant’s questions addressed to government witnesses asking for the arithmetical point at which they would consider a hypothetical bid to be the result of mistake. In so doing the court was within the bounds of the trial judge’s discretion in limiting cross-examination. Defendant was given ample opportunity to elicit facts, as distinguished from opinions, that would indicate that the government must have known that the bid was so high as to be a mistake.

No other point raised by appellant and not covered by Judge Levet’s findings of fact, discussion and conclusions of law merits discussion.

The judgment is affirmed.


Cases With Similar Vibessemantic neighbors from the corpus


Citator

Cited By

Full citator, related cases, and AI research tools

Open in FLexlaw