By odd coincidence, earlier today I was idly thinking about how the smell of road tar on a hot summer day evokes a memory from day camp when I was 8 - and a bunch of us campers were walking in a group down a country road on the way to a swimming pool. A couple living in the area had rented out their nice full-size pool for the day camp’s use.
I have wondered since why they would have tolerated all us kids in their pool. I mean, we were all white but still kind of icky. I guess maybe they needed the money. And I’ll bet this Philadelphia club has fallen on hard times and needed the dough too, which is why they contracted with the day camp (“But…but…we didn’t know how it would look, with all of those people here at once.”). I doubt this dust-up is going to help their bottom line.
And it seems a bit odd that someone at the club would accept payment of $1900 dollars without bothering to check what was coming their way. If the club didn’t have any idea what was coming, they’re very poorly managed or incredibly stupid.
Not to split hairs. But, the kids were from NE Philly the swim club is in Huntingdon Valley, PA. So, they were trying to import the wild NE Philadelphia way of life to the poor suburban H Valley dwellers. I can see why the president would be up in arms!
This story is so absurd is seems made up. Really? Complexion? You thought that was the appropriate word to use? Damn. Racist, tone deaf and idiotic!
Is this a hypothetical, or can you actually do that on their website? Because if you can, their claim to being a private club and thus allowed to discriminate went right out the window.
Oh, now, now, RR is too busy being, ahem, a lawyer.* Let’s pass over in silence the fact that he made a remark that suggests a surprising ignorance of the place of public accommodation concept, which is a chestnut of Constitutional Law curricula throughout the country.
a/k/a paralegal in the tax practice group at Sullivan & Cromwell?
If they have to pay more to get the same camp elsewhere, those would be forseeable damages.
Too, the camp could assert that, if it has to refund the money paid to it by those attending, then the lost revenue from that camp could be considered forseeable damages, especially since the contract was cancelled mid-camp.
Consider it this way: Suppose I am a scientist who has been awarded a $300 thousand research grant. And let’s say the terms of the grant require me to submit some routine documentation by some given deadline to the awarding foundation before disbursement. If this documentation is submitted, the money is disbursed; that is, the award is not contingent on the contents of the documentation, only the receipt of the documentation.
You are a courier and I explain all this to you. I then inform you that the awarding foundation is in the same town as you and me, and that the deadline is tomorrow at noon. I ask you to deliver the documentation, already prepared and packaged, by the deadline. You tell me you will do so for $20. I accept and give you the package.
The next day, at five minutes to noon, you come by and say, “I’ve decided that I won’t be performing. Here’s your package–and the twenty bucks–back.”
What do you contend the measure of damages is? Restitutionary (i.e., $20)? Or expectation/consequential (i.e., closer to $300K)?
ETA: Obviously not directed at DSYoungEsq, but his/her interlocutor.
Oh my. I hadn’t seen this when I posted. Good lord. I know Huntingdon Valley quite well. I lived next township over for most of my childhood. Family STILL there off of Meetinghouse Road…
Plenty of black folk there. Of course, they’re all driving trucks and cooking and doing the pool…
Sometimes I think these threads are just planted for lawyers to review first-year curriculum. This whole thread is like a bad MBE question on Palmer v. Thompson and Hadley v. Baxendale.
:: Disclaimer :: I am setting aside the potential civil rights violations and focussing solely on the breach of contract claim mentioned upthread to address what I think to be the wholly incorrect belief held by some of you that the club will have it’s lunch eaten on said claim:: Disclaimer ::
In this case, it is largely a distinction without a difference. There is no one exclusive method for the measure of damages arising form the breach of contract. If I am wrong under Penn law, I would gladly accept a cite. In many instances, restitution is an appropriate award. In a contract like this, where there are no foreseeable consequential damages (like lost profits), in all likelihood resitution (cost of club membership) would equal a “benefit of the bargain” award (cost of membership at a similar club). Specific performance is a very limitted remedy available where the benefit of the contract is so unique that a monetary award is insufficient. It would be ridiculous here. The camp needs to price out comparabel pools, join a pool, and sue the club for any difference if there is one. If they don’t do that, then they get $1,900 on a breach of contract claim.
You’ve just explained a breach of contract case. There was an agreement; it wasn’t honored. This is hardly unique in this aspect.
I doubt it “will cost the club big time” in the way that you’re prediciting (i.e. on a “breach of contract” claim). A lot would happen before a jury was even selected and even once done, the jury is charged to follow the law. The damages here are small (small claims, small). See above. This isn’t a retirement case.
Curious, do you have a legal education?
appearance; aspect; character: His confession put a different complexion on things.
A bunch of screaming kids outnumbering adults 10 to 1 changes the “complexion” of a family pool where the ratio is normally closer to 2 or 3 to 1. I am not defedning this douchebag club, but for chrissakes, recognize that he might have employed the beatuiful nuance of our language. I doubt this guy was saying the inner-city kids would give the club acne, either.
Don’t be absurd. Per their own website, even an All Summer Weekday Membership is $30 per child. At 60 kids, that’s $1800. Throw in some chaperones, and I’m not seeing much of a group discount. This group may have very well booked and paid online.
Not that it matters, I’m just saying that they may not have talked to someone there beforehand.
The club has made no assertion, nor has anyone else, that the kids were misbehaving. If that was the case, the president could have said so.
The suggestion that they were unprepared for the numbers also doesn’t fly becuse they already had to have known what the numbers would be when they contracted with the camp.
I think the suggestion that all the kids could be conspiring to lie is absurd in the extreme. I used to run summer day camps in the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul I took van loads of kids swimming all the time. They were majority black. A few had behavioral issues, most did not. It would have been impossible to get them all together to conspire on a story like this that had no truth to it. Geting them all to remember a story and stick to it is one thing, but an even bigger obstacle is that most of them are fundamentally honest. The suggestion that the kids are all lying is asinine, and is indicative to me of someone who has never worked with large groups of kids. It’s also a suggestion would NEVER be made about white kids.
