Tom and Joe prepared a written memo in which Jo agreed to sell his tomato crop t

Question

Tom and Joe prepared a written memo in which Jo agreed to sell his tomato crop to Tom for $40 a bushel when it was ripe and harvested. (The final harvest should be about 30 bushels of tomatoes.) Only Tom signed the memo as the buyer, and Tom put the memo in his safe. Later, Jo got a better offer and sent Tom a letter, which he signed, saying he had decided he wasn’t going to sell Tom his tomatoes like they agreed after all because he got a higher offer for them. Tom sued to enforce the contract, and Joe countered that the contract was unenforceable because of the Statute of Frauds. Who do you think will win, and why?

Explanation / Answer

I think since the parties to the agreement did not go into a legalized contract, it just remained a memorandum of agreement which is not enforceable by law. Moreover, the seller, Joe, did not even sign the document from his end to bring to effect. Hence one side of the parties to contract did not complete the formality. To make it a valid contract, the agreement had to be legalized with writing down in the document the expectations of both the party and the consideration for the same. In this way, the legal obligations of the parties to perform the contract would have been enforceable. But in absence of the contract document (memo just being a memorandum of agreement and not amounting to contract status), Joe would win.

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