| Court: | Supreme Court of Hawaii |
| Facts: | Car dealer in Hawaii offers a salesman in CA a job (sales manager); the job morphs to assistant sales manager along the way, but the guy moves to Hawaii at considerable inconvenience. He's fired 10 weeks later. Sues for breach of contract, alleging a specified term of employment. |
| Posture: | Statute of frauds gets dragged into this because there's no written document, but it's presumed that the contract could be performed within one year at trial. Verdict for the plaintiff, appealed. |
| Issue: | Did the trial court err is not directing the jury on theories of the non-existence of the contract? |
| Holding: | Affirmed: there was a contract, and failing to enforce it would be inequitable. |
| Rule: | We're trying to avoid frauds, so we apply Restatement (second) §217A (now known as §139). |
| Reasoning: | We want to support the basic policy, not the mechanical application, of the Statute of Frauds. |
| Dicta: | |