West Haven Sound Development Corp. v. City of West Haven

• Decision Date: 03 May 1988
• Docket Number: No. 13115,13115
• Citation: 541 A.2d 858,207 Conn. 308
• Parties: WEST HAVEN SOUND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION v. CITY OF WEST HAVEN.
• Court: Connecticut Supreme Court

Page 858

541 A.2d 858

207 Conn. 308

WEST HAVEN SOUND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION v. CITY OF WEST HAVEN.

No. 13115.

Supreme Court of Connecticut.

Argued Feb. 3, 1988.

Decided May 3, 1988.

Charles A. Sherwood, with whom, on the brief, was Joseph R. Mirrione, New Haven, for appellant-appellee (plaintiff).

Guy P. Sklaver, New Haven, with whom were Louis Smith Votto, West Haven, corporation counsel, and Irving Perlmutter, New Haven, for appellee-appellant (defendant).

Before PETERS, C.J., and SHEA, CALLAHAN, GLASS and HULL, JJ.

HULL, Associate Justice.

This is a breach of contract action. The parties to this appeal have been involved in litigation for more than thirteen years. This is the fourth time this case has been before this court, and we have heretofore clearly and adequately set forth the facts leading to the breach of contract. West Haven v. Impact, 174 Conn. 160, 384 A.2d 353 (1978); New Haven Savings Bank v. West Haven Sound Development, 190 Conn. 60, 459 A.2d 999 (1983); West Haven Sound Development Corporation v. West Haven, 201 Conn. 305, 514 A.2d 734 (1986). Therefore, a brief summary of the facts will suffice to establish the context of this appeal.

Early in 1973, the plaintiff, West Haven Sound Development Corporation, and the West Haven Development Agency entered into a contract under which the defendant, city of West Haven, conveyed a parcel of land to the plaintiff to be used pursuant to the defendant's urban renewal plan for the Savin Rock area of West Haven. The plan, which was incorporated by reference into the contract, provided for development of commercial, recreational and apartment uses on a substantial portion of the land in Savin Rock. The contract expressly provided that no modification of the plan affecting the rights of the redevelopers could be made without their consent. Pursuant to the contract, the plaintiff constructed a restaurant, called Phyllis', Inc., on its land and opened for business in December, 1973.

On October 17, 1974, the voters of West Haven passed a referendum requiring the defendant to annul its redevelopment plan and convert the remaining undeveloped land into a public park. The defendant sought the consent of the redevelopers to this purported modification of the plan; the plaintiff and several other redevelopers withheld their consent. The defendant then sought a declaratory judgment to determine whether the referendum was, in fact, a modification of the plan. The trial court held it was not and, on appeal to this court, the trial court's decision was reversed. See West Haven v. Impact, supra.

In May, 1977, Phyllis', Inc., closed. The plaintiff brought an action alleging that the defendant had breached its contract with the plaintiff by modifying the plan and that the breach had caused its business to fail. At trial, the jury returned a verdict for the plaintiff in the amount of $3.1 million. The defendant appealed to this court. We found no error on the issue of liability but remanded the case to the trial court for a new trial limited to the issue of damages. West Haven Sound Development Corporation v. West Haven, supra. On remand, the jury awarded damages of $300,000, to which the court added $282,230.14 in interest calculated from the date of the breach to the date of the verdict.

The plaintiff appeals on the following grounds: (1) the trial court permitted the issue of causation to be relitigated; (2) the court's interrogatories confused the jury as to the concept of foreseeability of damages; (3) the plaintiff was prejudiced by the interrogatories; (4) mitigation expenses were erroneously subjected to the test of foreseeability; and (5) the trial court erred in its instructions to the jury as to the method

                of evaluating the plaintiff's business following the defendant's breach.   The defendant cross appeals on the ground that interest should not have been awarded, but if correctly awarded, it should not have been computed from October 17, 1974, the date of the breach, but from January 3, 1978, the date of our decision in  West Haven v. Impact, supra. 1  We find no error on either the appeal or the cross appeal
                

THE PLAINTIFF'S APPEAL

CAUSATION

Prior to commencement of the trial on damages, the plaintiff filed a motion in limine asking the court to limit the trial to a determination of the amount and foreseeability of damages, and to preclude the issue of the causation of the plaintiff's business failure. The trial court denied the motion, ² explaining that this court had mandated a "redetermination of damages within the ambit of the applicable rules of law governing breach of contract"; and that "the scope of this trial will embrace a redetermination of the issues of damages which are causally related to this breach, which has already been established." The court added that the defendant's liability was not at issue at the trial.

The plaintiff argues: that in allowing causation to be relitigated on remand, the trial court went beyond the scope of our mandate; that this court affirmed the jury's finding of causation and this affirmation became the law of the case; that causation was res judicata; and that General Statutes § 52-266 limits the issues on retrial to those on which error has been found.

" 'In carrying out a mandate of this court, the trial court is limited to the specific direction of the mandate as interpreted in light of the opinion. [Emphasis added.] Mazzotta v. Bornstein, 105 Conn. 242, 243, 135 A. 38 [1926]. This is the guiding principle that the trial court must observe. State Bar Assn. v. Connecticut Bank & Trust Co., 146 Conn. 556, 561, 153 A.2d 453 [1959]. Compliance means that the direction is not deviated from. The trial court cannot adjudicate rights and duties not within the scope of the remand. Humphrey v. Gerard, 84 Conn. 216, 221-22, 79 A. 57 [1911].' Nowell v. Nowell, 163 Conn. 116, 121, 302 A.2d 260 (1972); State v. Avcollie, 188 Conn. 626, 643, 453 A.2d 418 (1982). 'It is the duty of the trial court on remand to comply strictly with the mandate of the appellate court according to its true intent and meaning. No judgment other than that directed or permitted by the reviewing court may be rendered, even though it may be one that the appellate court might have directed. The trial court should examine the mandate and the opinion of the reviewing court and proceed in conformity with the views expressed therein.' (Emphasis added.) Nowell v. Nowell, supra." Wendland v. Ridgefield Construction Services, Inc., 190 Conn. 791, 794-95, 462 A.2d 1043 (1983).

The trial court, in denying the plaintiff's motion in limine, initially expressed some uncertainty as to what this court At the first trial of this case, the jury returned a general verdict for the plaintiff. When a jury returns a general verdict for the plaintiff, we must presume that it found all issues in favor of the plaintiff. Tetro v. Stratford, 189 Conn. 601, 610, 458 A.2d 5 (1983). Accordingly, in our analysis of the damages component of the verdict, we presumed that the jury had found that the damages awarded were caused by the breach. We also concluded that the jury could reasonably have found that damages were caused by the breach. The plaintiff appears to rely on these opening statements of our analysis to foreclose reconsideration on remand of the issue of causation of damages. Our analysis, however, did not end there. We proceeded to assess the sufficiency of the evidence to prove the specific damages claimed by the plaintiff to have been caused by the breach. We concluded that the verdict was excessive; that there was insufficient evidence from which the jury could have evaluated and awarded damages for diminution in the value of the plaintiff's business caused by the breach; that there might have been some overlapping or duplication of certain elements of damages; and that, while the plaintiff would have been entitled to recover the cost of its reasonable efforts to mitigate its damages, there was no way to ascertain the extent to which the jury considered these expenses in its award. West Haven Sound Development Corporation v. West Haven, supra, 201 Conn. at 316-32, 514 A.2d 734.

                intended the scope of the proceedings on remand to be, but acknowledged that it was bound by the principles enunciated in  Wendland v. Ridgefield Construction Services, Inc., supra.   It ultimately construed our opinion in  West Haven Sound Development Corporation v. West Haven, supra, to permit consideration of causation as it pertains to determining damages related to the breach.   The trial court was correct
                

We attributed these results to the absence of appropriate instructions to the jury as to how they were to compute damages if they found a breach. Id., 327, 514 A.2d 734. We noted that the jury had been "left to calculate damages in their largely unbridled discretion," without having had the elements of damages identified, delineated or explained. Id., 333, 514 A.2d 734. Further, recognizing the complexity of this case, we stated that, on remand, the trial court should afford the jury detailed guidance on the legal doctrines underlying the calculation of damages. Id. We made it clear that, throughout our opinion, we had articulated only standards for identifying and valuing the damages claimed by the plaintiff and emphasized that their compensability was contingent upon their foreseeability. Id., 332-33, 514 A.2d 734. We also remarked that, on remand, the plaintiff was not bound by our categorization of the elements of damages or the values we assigned to each grouping, but that "the plaintiff is free to value and prove its damages, and under whatever theory as it wishes. In short, the plaintiff on remand is not collaterally estopped by the dollar amounts or theories of recovery discussed in this opinion." Id., 322 n. 4, 514 A.2d 734. To summarize, we found error in the resolution of virtually every issue pertaining to the award of damages. Accordingly,...