Constructive fraud, acts constituting
Applied in 11 court decisions — leading case Biegler v. American Family Mutual Insurance Co. (2001)
Most recently applied in Beals v. Autotrac, Inc. (November 2017)
Source: CivC 1877, § 884; CL 1887, § 3508; RCivC 1903, § 1202; RC 1919, § 817; SDC 1939, § 10.0308.
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Constructive fraud consists:
(1) In any breach of duty which, without any actually fraudulent intent, gains an advantage to the person in fault or anyone claiming under him, by misleading another to his prejudice or to the prejudice of anyone claiming under him; or
(2) In any such act or omission as the law specially declares to be fraudulent, without respect to actual fraud.
Official source: South Dakota Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain South Dakota statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.