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Rumbin v. Utica Mutual Insurance Co.8/15/2000
1960) § 404, p. 5, and § 432, pp. 181-83. Safeco, therefore, is fully protected against any actual damages that it might sustain as a result of the plaintiff's breach of the antiassignment provision. The modern approach thus serves the dual objectives of free assignability of contracts together with full compensation for any actual damages that might result from an assignment made in breach of an antiassignment provision.
The judgment is affirmed.
In this opinion BORDEN and PALMER, Js., concurred.
NORCOTT, J., with whom KATZ, J., joins, dissenting.
I agree with the majority's conclusion that General Statutes § 52-225f does not act to invalidate antiassignment provisions as a general matter. I disagree, however, with the majority's determination that our common law, and § 322 of the Restatement (Second) of Contracts, give the plaintiff, Marco Rumbin, the freedom to ignore a validly executed, and freely made, antiassignment provision in order to transfer his right to payment under the structured settlement agreement. I therefore respectfully dissent.
I.
I take no issue with the well settled precept of modern contract law that a "contractual right can be assigned unless . . . the assignment is forbidden by statute or is otherwise inoperative on grounds of public policy, or . . . assignment is validly precluded by contract." 3 Restatement (Second), Contracts § 317 (1981). Without this rule, which replaced the anachronistic common-law prohibition against the assignment of choses in action, "our modern credit economy could not exist." 3 E. Farnsworth, Contracts (1990) § 11.2, p. 61. Certainly, the majority is correct when it notes that "courts [have] recognized the necessity of permitting the transfer of contract rights. . . . As a result, an assignor typically can transfer his contractual right to receive future payments to an assignee." (Citations omitted; internal quotation marks omitted.)
That said, the majority chooses to ignore a concept that is just as central to this court's jurisprudence, namely, a healthy respect for the power of independent persons to bargain for, or away, contractual provisions in the course of making a contract. This court repeatedly has emphasized that, absent fraud, duress, unconscionability, or other similar infirmity, courts are not in the business of remaking contracts to suit the changing whims of the contracting parties. See, e.g., Robert Lawrence Associates, Inc. v. Del Vecchio, 178 Conn. 1, 21-22, 420 A.2d 1142 (1979) ("whether provident or improvident . . . contracts voluntarily and fairly made should be held valid and enforced in the courts"). As this court recently stated, " ven if the result of the fair and logical enforcement of unambiguous agreements seems unduly to burden one of the parties, we decline to embark a voyage into uncharted waters in which untrammeled and unrestrained judicial revisionism would depart significantly from an aspect of contract law upon which contracting parties reasonably can be assumed to have relied for many years." Tallmadge Bros., Inc. v. Iroquois Gas Transmission System, L.P., 252 Conn. 479, 506, 746 A.2d 1277 (2000). Therefore, in spite of the aforementioned importance of contractual alienability, this court has a responsibility not to render unrecognizable the basic rules of contract law.
Bearing those competing concerns in mind, the general rule governing antiassignment provisions is that " contract term prohibiting assignment of rights under the contract, unless a different intention is manifested . . . gives the obligor a right to damages for breach of the terms forbidding assignment but does not render the assignment ineffective .
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