Mistake of fact defined
Applied in 11 court decisions — leading case LPN Trust v. Farrar Outdoor Advertising, Inc. (1996)
Most recently applied in Schaefer v. Sioux Spine & Sport, Prof. LLC (January 2018)
Source: CivC 1877, § 888; CL 1887, § 3512; RCivC 1903, § 1206; RC 1919, § 821; SDC 1939, § 10.0312.
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.
Mistake of fact is a mistake not caused by the neglect of a legal duty on the part of the person making the mistake and consisting in:
(1) An unconscious ignorance or forgetfulness of a fact, past or present, material to the contract; or
(2) Belief in the present existence of a thing material to the contract which does not exist, or in the past existence of such a thing which has not existed.
Official source: South Dakota Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain South Dakota statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.