Pyne v. Wood

Decided January 6, 1888

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1888-01-06

Contract, to recover the sum of $64, paid by the plaintiff, a minor. Trial in the Superior Court, without a jury, before Hammond, J., who allowed a bill of exceptions, in substance as follows: On June 1, 1886, the plaintiff, who was then nearly seventeen years old, bought a bicycle of the defendant, and paid $30 in cash on account of the same. He also signed a paper writing by which he agreed to pay further sums of money from time to time.

Relies on McCarthy v. Henderson · Leonard v. Stott

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1888-01-06

How this case has been cited

Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently March 1948

13 state decisions

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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W. Allen, J.

¶1There is nothing in this case to distinguish it from McCarthy v. Henderson, 138 Mass. 310, and it must be governed by that decision.

¶2The facts that the plaintiff was present when his father demanded the money of the defendant, and himself carried the bicycle to the defendant’s shop when it was returned to him, and that the plaintiff consented to the bringing of the action, certainly warrant the findings that the contract was avoided by the plaintiff, and that the action was properly brought. The statement of the plaintiff on the witness stand that he was then willing to stand by the contract, did not show that he had not avoided the contract, or that there was not a good cause of action.

¶3There was no error in the finding that the bicycle was not a necessary. Merriam v. Cunningham, 11 Cush. 40. Leonard v. Stott, 108 Mass. 46. Exceptions overruled.