Kolodziej v. Mason

• Decision Date: 18 December 2014
• Docket Number: No. 14–10644.,14–10644.
• Citation: 774 F.3d 736
• Parties: Dustin S. KOLODZIEJ, Plaintiff–Appellant, v. James Cheney MASON, J. Cheney Mason, P.A., Defendants–Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

774 F.3d 736

Dustin S. KOLODZIEJ, Plaintiff–Appellant

v.James Cheney MASON, J. Cheney Mason, P.A., Defendants–Appellees.

No. 14–10644.

United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit.

Dec. 18, 2014.

William David George, Connelly Baker Wotring, LLP, Houston, TX, for Plaintiff–Appellant.

Lisabeth Fryer, Lisabeth Fryer, P.A., Winter Park, FL, Louis K. Bonham, Law Office of Osha Lian, LLP, Austin, TX, Thomas K. Equels, Equels Law Firm, Orlando, FL, Brian Kent Wunder, Law Office of Osha Liang, LLP, Houston, TX, for Defendants–Appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida. D.C. Docket No. 6:11–cv–00859–CEH–GJK.

Before WILSON and ROSENBAUM, Circuit Judges, and SCHLESINGER,^* District Judge.

Opinion

WILSON, Circuit Judge:

This case involves a law student's efforts to form a contract by accepting a “million-dollar challenge” that a lawyer extended on national television while representing a client accused of murder. Since we find that the challenge did not give rise to an enforceable unilateral contract, we hold that the district court properly entered summary judgment for the lawyer and his law firm, Defendants–Appellees James Cheney Mason (Mason) and J. Cheney Mason, P.A., with regard to the breach-of-contract claim brought by the law student, Plaintiff–Appellant Dustin S. Kolodziej.

I.

The current dispute—whether Mason formed a unilateral contract with Kolodziej—arose from comments Mason made while representing criminal defendant Nelson Serrano, who stood accused of murdering his former business partner as well as the son, daughter, and son-in-law of a third business partner. During Serrano's highly publicized capital murder trial, Mason participated in an interview with NBC News in which he focused on the seeming implausibility of the prosecution's theory of the case. Indeed, his client ostensibly had an alibi—on the day of the murders, Serrano claimed to be on a business trip in an entirely different state, several hundred miles away from the scene of the crimes in central Florida. Hotel surveillance video confirmed that Serrano was at a La Quinta Inn (La Quinta) in Atlanta, Georgia, several hours before and after the murders occurred in Bartow, Florida.

However, the prosecution maintained that Serrano committed the murders in an approximately ten-hour span between the times that he was seen on the security camera. According to the prosecution, after being recorded by the hotel security camera in the early afternoon, Serrano slipped out of the hotel and, traveling under several aliases, flew from Atlanta to Orlando, where he rented a car, drove to Bartow, Florida, and committed the murders.

From there, Serrano allegedly drove to the Tampa International Airport, flew back to Atlanta, and drove from the Atlanta International Airport to the La Quinta, to make an appearance on the hotel's security footage once again that evening.

Mason argued that it was impossible for his client to have committed the murders in accordance with this timeline; for instance, for the last leg of the journey, Serrano would have had to get off a flight in Atlanta's busy airport, travel to the La Quinta several miles away, and arrive in that hotel lobby in only twenty-eight minutes. After extensively describing the delays that would take place to render that twenty-eight-minute timeline even more unlikely,¹ Mason stated, “I challenge anybody to show me, and guess what? Did they bring in any evidence to say that somebody made that route, did so? State's burden of proof. If they can do it, I'll challenge 'em. I'll pay them a million dollars if they can do it.”

NBC did not broadcast Mason's original interview during Serrano's trial. At the conclusion of the trial, the jury returned a guilty verdict in Serrano's case. Thereafter, in December 2006, NBC featured an edited version of Mason's interview in a national broadcast of its “Dateline” television program. The edited version removed much of the surrounding commentary, including Mason's references to the State's burden of proof, and Mason's statement aired as, “I challenge anybody to show me—I'll pay them a million dollars if they can do it.”

Enter Kolodziej, then a law student at the South Texas College of Law, who had been following the Serrano case. Kolodziej saw the edited version of Mason's interview and understood the statement as a serious challenge, open to anyone, to “make it off the plane and back to the hotel within [twenty-eight] minutes”—that is, in the prosecution's timeline—in return for one million dollars.

Kolodziej subsequently ordered and studied the transcript of the edited interview, interpreting it as an offer to form a unilateral contract—an offer he decided to accept by performing the challenge. In December 2007, Kolodziej recorded himself retracing Serrano's alleged route, traveling from a flight at the Atlanta airport to what he believed was the former location of the now-defunct La Quinta within twenty-eight minutes. Kolodziej then sent Mason a copy of the recording of his journey and a letter stating that Kolodziej had performed the challenge and requested payment. Mason responded with a letter in which he refused payment and denied that he made a serious offer in the interview. Kolodziej again demanded payment, and Mason again refused.

Considering Mason's refusal to pay a breach of contract, Kolodziej sued Mason and Mason's law firm, J. Cheney Mason, P.A., in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Although the court dismissed the case for lack of personal jurisdiction, it was then that Kolodziej discovered the existence of Mason's unedited interview with NBC and learned that Dateline had independently edited the interview before it aired.² Kolodziej subsequently filed suit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. That suit was transferred to the Middle District of Florida, where Mason moved for summary judgment.

The district court granted summary judgment on two grounds: first, Kolodziej was unaware of the unedited Mason interview at the time he attempted to perform the challenge, and thus he could not accept an offer he did not know existed; second, the challenge in the unedited interview was unambiguously directed to the prosecution only, and thus Kolodziej could not accept an offer not open to him. The district court declined to address the arguments that Mason's challenge was not a serious offer and that, in any event, Kolodziej did not adequately perform the challenge. This appeal ensued.

II.

Sitting in diversity, the district court properly applied Florida law to Kolodziej's breach-of-contract claim; in considering Kolodziej's appeal, we too look to the substantive law of the State of Florida. See Allison v. Vintage Sports Plaques, 136 F.3d 1443, 1445 (11th Cir.1998) (citing Erie R.R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64, 58 S.Ct. 817, 82 L.Ed. 1188 (1938) ).

We review a district court's grant of summary judgment de novo. Iraola & CIA, S.A. v. Kimberly–Clark Corp., 325 F.3d 1274, 1283 (11th Cir.2003). A grant of summary judgment may be upheld on any basis supported by the record. Fitzpatrick v. City of Atlanta, 2 F.3d 1112, 1117 (11th Cir.1993).

III.

The case before us involves the potential creation of an oral, unilateral contract.³ Under Florida law, the question of whether a valid contract exists is a threshold question of law that may be properly decided by the court. See Acumen Constr., Inc. v. Neher, 616 So.2d 98, 99 (Fla.Dist.Ct.App.1993) ; accord Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc., 88 F.Supp.2d 116, 122 (S.D.N.Y.1999), aff'd 210 F.3d 88 (2d Cir.2000) (per curiam).

“To prove the existence of a contract, a plaintiff must plead: (1) offer; (2) acceptance; (3) consideration; and (4) sufficient specification of the essential terms.”

Vega v. T–Mobile USA, Inc., 564 F.3d 1256, 1272 (11th Cir.2009) (citing St. Joe Corp. v. McIver, 875 So.2d 375, 381 (Fla.2004) ). An oral contract is subject to all basic requirements of contract law, St. Joe Corp., 875 So.2d at 381, and mutual assent is a prerequisite for the formation of any contract, see Gibson v. Courtois, 539 So.2d 459, 460 (Fla.1989) (“Mutual assent is an absolute condition precedent to the formation of the contract.”); Jacksonville Port Auth. v. W.R. Johnson Enters. Inc., 624 So.2d 313, 315 (Fla.Dist.Ct.App.1993) ( “In order to create a contract it is essential that there be reciprocal assent to a certain and definite proposition.” (internal quotation marks omitted)); Barroso v. Respiratory Care Servs., Inc., 518 So.2d 373, 376 (Fla.Dist.Ct.App.1987) (noting that mutual or reciprocal assent must be proven to establish an oral contract).

Mutual assent is not necessarily an independent “element” unto itself; rather, we evaluate the existence of assent by analyzing the parties' agreement process in terms of offer and acceptance.⁴ See Newman v. Schiff, 778 F.2d 460, 465 (8th Cir.1985). A valid contract—premised on the parties' requisite willingness to contract—may be “manifested through written or spoken words, or inferred in whole or in part from the parties' conduct.” L & H Constr. Co. v. Circle Redmont, Inc., 55 So.3d 630, 634 (Fla.Dist.Ct.App.2011) (internal quotation marks omitted). We use “an objective test ... to determine whether a contract is enforceable.” See Robbie v. City of Miami, 469 So.2d 1384, 1385 (Fla.1985) ; see also Leonard, 88 F.Supp.2d at 128 (noting that the determination of whether a party made an offer to enter into a contract requires “the [c]ourt to determine how a reasonable, objective person would have understood” the potential offeror's communication).

IV.

We do not find that Mason's statements were such that a reasonable, objective person would have understood them to be an invitation to contract, regardless of whether we look to the unedited interview or the edited television broadcast seen by Kolodziej. Neither the content of Mason's statements, nor the circumstances in which he made them, nor the...