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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA woman is entitled to her equal share of a farm that her former boyfriend purchased a decade ago for the couple to live on, the Indiana Court of Appeals has ruled.
During their time as a couple, Thomas Fox and Judith Barker lived together for 10 years on a 99-acre farm and put both of their names on the deed, listed as tenants in common.
Eight years after the relationship ended, Barker sued to partition the property, prompting Fox to counterclaim breach of settlement and seek to reform the deed.
However, the trial court granted Barker’s motion for partial summary judgment, where it found that Barker and Fox were tenants in common and that Barker was entitled to an equal share of the farm, less any appropriate equitable adjustment to be determined by the jury.
In an interlocutory appeal, Fox argued that the deed should be reformed to show Fox as the sole owner of the farm because Barker’s rights to the land were a gift he contemplated but never completed. But the Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed, finding the partial summary judgment order was proper.
“Fox’s argument is built on a faulty foundation. Regardless of whether the deed was a gift, Fox’s unilateral mistake cannot justify reformation. His confusion over the nature of the instrument was a mistake of law, not one of fact. The distinction between mistakes of law and fact has fallen away in many jurisdictions, but it remains in Indiana,” Judge Leanna Weissmann wrote for the appellate court in an interlocutory appeal.
“Regardless of what Fox believed he was doing, the legal effect of putting Barker’s name on the deed was to make the two tenants in common. Because Fox is mistaken about the nature of the deed itself, we cannot reform it.”
As to Fox’s affirmative defenses, the appellate court concluded that the deed is neither a will nor an incomplete gift, he failed to show as material the ex-couple’s purported settlement agreement in dispute, and that he did not satisfy the elements of equitable estoppel.
“Fox’s alleged losses seem ripe for the equitable adjustment reserved for the jury by the court below. We see no need to address them here,” it concluded.
Thus, the appellate court affirmed the grant of partial summary judgment to Barker in Thomas R Fox v. Judith Ann Barker, 20A-PL-02003.
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