Minnesota Supreme Court, 1880

Sutton v. Wood

Minnesota Supreme Court · Decided December 3, 1880 · Cornell

27 Minn. 362; 7 N.W. 365; 1880 Minn. LEXIS 103 (Minnesota Reports)

Counsel

Koon, Merrill & Keith, for appellant., George B. Robinson, for respondent,

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Citation treatment has not been reviewed for this case. The notes below come from the citation graph and the Minnesota Revisor's amendment records, not from a review of how later courts treated this decision.

(as of 9/30/2026)

Last cited by a Minnesota appellate court in 1899, among the opinions in this site’s citation index.

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Cases that cite this one

2 later published cases cite this decision.

Brown v. Equitable Life Assurance Society of United States (Minn. 1899)
Malone v. Porter (Cuyahoga Circuit Court 1902)

This list shows which later cases cite this one. It does not say how they treated it, and no review of that has been done. Not a substitute for Shepard’s or KeyCite — verify before relying.

Opinion of the Court

Cornell, J.

To give to the conduct or admission of a party the character and effect of an estoppel, it must have been fraudulent in its purpose, or, in the absence of any such express intention, so directly unjust in its result as to make out against him a clear case of culpable negligence in not having contemplated it as the natural consequence of his admission. Combs v. Cooper, 5 Minn. 200 (254;) Whitacre v. Culver, 6 Minn. 203 (297;) Same v. Same, 8 Minn. 103 (133;) Pence v. Arbuckle, 22 Minn. 417; Coleman v. Pearce, 26 Minn. 123; Andrews v. Lyon, 11 Allen, 349; Pierce v. Andrews, 6 Cush. 4.

The case at bar presents neither of these elements. The admission relied on as an estoppel is not shown to have been made to mislead and induce the plaintiff to make the purchase he afterwards did, or with any frudulent purpose whatever. No reference was made to any purchase. Defendant had no knowledge or intimation that one was contemplated, or that plaintiff was in any way interested in learning from him the ownership of the property. It is not even shown that the plaintiff at the time had any intention of buying the property, or that such an intention was suggested to him by the admission or anything that there occurred. No fault can be *364attributed to defendant on the ground.of negligence, for he had no reason to suppose that his statement as to the ownership of the property would influence the plaintiff to buy it; and the nature and circumstances of the admission were not such as would naturally, or even probably, tend to that result.

Judgment reversed.

Case-law data current through September 30, 2026. Source: CourtListener bulk data.