Happy Fiftieth Birthday to Lucy v. Zehmer!

Who would have thought that two good ol’ Virginnie boys sitting at a bar getting "high as a Georgia pine" would lead to one of the most famous and popular of American contract cases?  Yet fifty years to the day after the Virginia Supreme Court decided Lucy v. Zehmer, the case is a fixture of nearly every contracts casebook—and is likely to remain so.

Douglas Boshkoff’s limerick on the case:

Land contracts are serious stuff,
So Lucy's attorney got tough.
"We don't know the truth.
Was it due to vermouth?"
Well, the court quickly called Zehmer's bluff.

From:  Selected Poems on the Law of Contracts, 66 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 1533, 1536 (1991)

The opinion is here in HTML and here in PDF.  For an interesting Lithuanian-English parallel translation (ever wonder how Lithuanians say "high as a Georgia pine"?) see here.

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