Utah Law Developments

• Jurisdiction: Utah,United States
• Citation: Vol. 26 No. 4 Pg. 22
• Pages: 22
• Publication year: 2013

Utah Law Developments Vol. 26 No. 4 Pg. 22 Utah Bar Journal August 2013

July/August 2013

APPELLATE HIGHLIGHTS

Rodney R. Parker and julianne P. Blanch.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following appellate cases of interest were recently decided by the United States Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, Utah Supreme Court, and Utah Court of Appeals. These summaries were compiled to provide a reference to practitioners who want to know in a five-to-ten-minute read what has been happening of significance in our appellate courts

ASC Utah, Inc. v. Wolf Mountain Resorts, L.C., 2013 UT 24 (May 3, 2013)

After a seven-week trial in 2011, the jury awarded ASC Utah ("ASCU") $54, 437, 000 in damages against Wolf Mountain. The court ordered Wolf Mountain's real and personal property to be sold to satisfy the judgment. At the public sheriffs sale, ASCU purchased all of Wolf Mountain's claims in the litigation. When Wolf Mountain appealed from the judgment, ASCU argued the appeal was moot because the controversy was eliminated when it purchased Wolf Mountain's claims, including its appellate rights. The court found that the appeal was not moot because the term "claim" did not encompass Wolf Mountain's appellate rights; rather, it included only demands for affirmative relief. Nevertheless, the court affirmed the judgment on the merits.

Goggin v. Goggin, 2013 UT 16, 299 F.3d 1079 (March 15, 2013)

The trial court found that the husband was guilty of "reprehensible" and "contemptuous" conduct, including discovery abuses, and it sanctioned him with an award of attorney fees to the wife. The awarded fees exceeded the amount the wife claimed was actually caused by the bad conduct. The Utah Supreme Court identified the four bases for awards of fees as (1) contractual or statutory authorization (in this case, contempt); (2) sanctions under Utah Rule of Civil Procedure 37; (3) awards pursuant to the court's inherent equitable powers, usually where a party "acts in bad faith, vexatiously wantonly, or for oppressive reasons, " id. ¶ 34 (internal quotation marks omitted); and (4) sanctions under the court's inherent sanction powers, which are usually deployed against attorneys but may be deployed against a party to litigation. The amount of sanction cannot exceed the actual injury the misconduct caused the other party, and the court reversed the sanction award on that basis. Separately, the court held that the trial court abused its discretion by awarding wife the full value of...