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Contracts Keyed to Calamari
Simkin v. Blank
Citation:
Court of Appeals of New York, 2012. 19 N.Y.3d 46, 968 N.E.2d 459, 945 N.Y.S.2d 222.Facts
Plaintiff and defendant were (respectively) husband and wife. After two decades of marriage, they decided to operate, and spent two years finalizing a divorce settlement. As a part of this settlement, the husband paid the wife several hundred thousand dollars, and took for himself an investment account managed by Bernard L. Madoff Securities. Shortly after the divorce settlement was finalized, the Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff was publicly exposed, and the husbands investment account (assumed by the settlement agreement to be worth more than $5,000,000) became practically worthless. The husband sued to renegotiate the divorce settlement on the grounds of mutual mistake.
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