“In love as in business, you pay your money, you take your chances. The difference is, in business you can ask for a refund.” — Andrea Peyser, “These Clueless Tycoons Need a Lesson in Love,” New York Post, Dec. 17, 1997.
On Nov. 8, just in time for the seasonal slew of holiday engagements, the SJC gifted us a decision in Johnson v. Settino that has the cut, clarity and weightiness of a marquise diamond. And it quite literally put teeth in the decision.
Amatory torts
By way of background, prior to the enactment of incongruously named “heart-balm statutes,” a panoply of causes of action were available to salve the wounds from the misaligned slings-and-arrows radiating from Cupid’s bow.
The broken-hearted could bring amatory tort actions for “criminal conversation” (suing a third party for adultery); “alienation of affection” (suing homewreckers for causing marital desertion); “breach of promise to marry” (suing for inducing a woman to engage in sexual behavior in which she would not otherwise have engaged but for her marital expectations); and “seduction” (the prerogative of the father of an unmarried woman to sue for damages resulting from premarital sex or unwed motherhood).
Beginning in the 1930s, across the country, those common law opportunities for the lovesick were eroding as heart-balm acts abolished those amatory torts as legally cognizable causes of action for breaches of contract to marry.
As a sign of the times concordant with evolving societal attitudes toward gender, courtship and a view toward more modern, equitable norms between the sexes (including women becoming permitted to gain control over their personal property), those common law actions were deemed antithetical to the role and purpose of the judicial system.
Moreover, the courts neither wanted to have a role in vengeful jilted lovers resorting to actual or threatened high-stakes blackmail, nor did they believe money damages could mend a broken heart.
In 1938, Massachusetts enacted our version of heart-balm statutes, legislating that “[b]reach of contract to marry shall not constitute an injury or wrong recognized by law” (G.L.c. 207, §47A), and “[a]lineation of affection and criminal conversation shall not constitute an injury or wrong recognized by law” (G.L.c. 207, §47B).
And the courts weighed in with their view in the seminal engagement ring case DeCicco v. Barker, 339 Mass. 457) (1959), which had stood the test of time for the past six decades until last month.
At the heart (pun intended) of the court’s reasoning, it was proclaimed there should be a determination of fault to the ring’s giver or taker when weighing the merits of the rightful owner of the ring.
The court was clear in pronouncing engagement rings as conditional gifts: If the marriage did not go forward, the giver of the ring was entitled to have it back, but only if the giver was “without fault.”
DeCicco considered whether the aforementioned heart-balm statutes also precluded a donor’s ability to recover the ring based on equitable principles of restitution of property.
The court found that rings must be returned to the donor so long as the donor was without fault in breaking the pledge to go forward with the nuptials.
The essential problem in finding fault with the terminator breaking the engagement is that while it appears on the surface to provide an efficiently elegant resolution, it truly does not.
Not only are courts left to delve into the murky cause-and-effect depths of who did want to whom and when, the engagement terminator is conclusively shackled with the label of being at fault. If the terminator has a sincere reason to believe that the spouse-to-be is having an affair, or is demeaning in words or actions, or fails to put the proverbial cap back on the toothpaste, is a conflated causation analysis really necessary? Shouldn’t it be sufficient that there was a change of heart?
The giver and the taker
Even though, ultimately, the circumstances were largely set aside in Bruce Johnson and Caroline Settino’s case, it is worth contextualizing the facts of the case given the highly personal and sensitive nature of the analysis.
In 2016, when the parties started dating, they enjoyed glamorous vacations, exclusively paid for by Bruce. Caroline was showered with expensive gifts of jewelry, shoes, purses and clothing. Noteworthily, throughout the years, it was Bruce’s habit to give Caroline receipts for the gifts.
Getting to the teeth of the matter, after Caroline mentioned to Bruce that she was considering dental implant surgery, Bruce agreed to pay for the two-part procedure.
During the following year, the couple began shopping for engagement rings. Bruce selected a $70,000 solitaire diamond ring from Tiffany’s and proposed to Caroline in August 2017. In addition, Bruce bought two wedding bands a couple of months later. Consistent with his gifting custom, Bruce gave Caroline a receipt for all the rings.
The couple happily planned a Sept. 22, 2018, wedding date.
Shortly after the engagement, however, Bruce experienced what he believed were untenable changes in Caroline’s behavior ranging from her calling him a “moron,” berating him over accidentally spilled drinks, and refusing to accompany him to cancer treatments.
Nevertheless, Bruce intended to carry through with the wedding plans, until a fateful night three months after the engagement when Caroline told Bruce in the aftermath of an argument that she “was a good-looking woman, and she could get a man whenever she wanted.”
And then there was the kiss of death message Bruce found on Caroline’s phone to another man: “My Bruce is going to be in Connecticut for three days. I need some playtime.”
That led Bruce down a rabbit hole only to discover voicemail messages in which the man referred to Caroline as “cupcake.”
Despite her denials of any wrongdoing, the disturbing messages triggered Bruce to reflect on what had transpired since the engagement when things started to go south at a rapid clip.
Bruce decided to end the engagement. Caroline kept the engagement ring and both wedding bands. And Bruce did not pay for the second part of Caroline’s dental implant surgery.
Court intervention
When Bruce sought to recover the engagement ring and wedding bands in the trial court proceedings, Caroline answered pro se with a counterclaim for the second half of her dental surgery.
The trial judge dismissed Bruce’s argument that any “fault” analysis must surely include an ascertainment as to whether his actions were reasonable under the circumstances.
The judge found that Bruce was at fault as he was solely responsible for calling off the wedding since he “failed to show by a preponderance of the evidence that … [Caroline] was having a sexual affair” and concluded that the man and Caroline had simply been friends for the past 40 years; that since Bruce had given, and Caroline had accepted, the engagement ring and wedding bands in anticipation of marriage, she was entitled to keep the ring and one of the bands; and that Bruce must pay for the promised dental implants.
On appeal, a divided court reversed the trial judge in part and emphasized that appellate courts in Massachusetts have not addressed how fault should be meted out in broken engagement matters, and that “even among our sister jurisdictions there is an absence of any legal standard by which a fact finder can adjudge the culpability or fault in a prenuptial breakup.”
The SJC took up the case and reviewed the question of law de novo. The court considered concerns noted by other jurisdictions in the assessment of a blame calculus, which spanned from musing about the intermeddling of future in-laws; pets Fido and Tabby not getting along; or differences in political perspectives.
Unlike cases not of the heart in which a reasonable person standard is typically applied, in the context of romantic breakups the SJC believed it was untenable, not to mention unseemly, to engage in a deep dive as part of a fault-based legal standard.
And, so, the wisdom to be derived from the decision is not only that the one who pulls the plug on the engagement is not necessarily the one to whom blame should be assessed, but the court is no longer even going to engage in a fault-based analysis.
Although a diamond’s value is measured universally by carat, cut, clarity and color, no such one-size-fits all standard can analogously be applied to the implosion of a betrothed couple’s relationship.
Rather, the SJC instructs us that while engagement rings are conditional gifts (with the only condition being the actual occurrence of marriage ceremony), the court embraced the “modern trend adopted by the majority of jurisdictions” by eradicating fault and streamlining the analysis to rule that, regardless of assignment of fault, the engagement ring must be unconditionally returned to the donor despite the circumstances that led to the broken engagement.
Role of public policy in affaires de coeur
With its Johnson v. Settino decision, the SJC has closed an important theoretical gap in family law cases: By jumping ship from the minority of states that assess fault in broken engagements to the majority of states that abandon that analysis, now our no-fault engagement cases parallel our no-default divorce cases.
Bruce’s attorney, Stephanie Taverna Siden, offered this observation: “By following the modern trend and removing fault from the equation, the court simplifies the termination of engagements and settles the issue of ownership of the engagement ring, allowing parties that find themselves in this position in the future to move on with their lives much sooner and avoid lengthy litigation.”
Caroline’s attorney, Nick Rosenberg, agreed “that the SJC took a much-needed step to modernize the law in this area and remove one of the last vestiges of a time when courts were asked to determine fault in such a highly personal and subjective area. We of course also hoped that the court would similarly jettison the presumption that a ring is given conditionally and not fully vested unless the recipient completes the promise of marriage. It is otherwise well-established that a breach of a promise to marry is not an injury recognized by law, and rings should be no different.”
The SJC did not cavalierly cast away the principles embedded in DeCicco and was mindful of the importance of stare decisis in our jurisprudence as that doctrine lends predictability and consistency to the law.
That said, the SJC wisely concluded that putting the thumb on the scales of justice tipping in favor of stare decisis when it means “sticking to some wrong decisions” is insufficient justification to apply DeCicco, especially when “the rule does not involve an interpretation of a statute and instead was of our own making.”
In the end, while grateful to the SJC for its new bright line, some are left to wonder whether public policy demands that states have a legitimate interest in providing redress for cases that do not squarely align within those bounds.
And query whether the SJC cherry-picked in treating differentially dentistry from rightful possession of an engagement ring. Should certain contract principles be applied to dental work but not to engagement rings?
We will just have to stay tuned, with the hope that the question is considered and decided before another six decades elapse.
Vicki L. Shemin is a partner at Fields & Dennis in Wellesley. She can be contacted at vshemin@fieldsdennis.com.
