| Court: | Supreme Court of Oklahoma |
| Facts: | Plaintiffs own a farm, under some of which there was coal. Defendants leased the farmland for strip mining. One condition of the lease was that the land be restored to its prior condition at the end of the mining. Defendants mined, but then failed to do the clean- up, perhaps because of rain, and perhaps because they never intended to. |
| Posture: | Initial trial finds for plaintiffs, but damages are small relative to the amount sought. They appeal, and the defendant counter-appeals. |
| Issue: | What is the proper measure of damages, and did the trial court correctly instruct the jury? |
| Holding: | The defendants substantially performed, and should not be held liable for expenses that outstrip the magnitude of the direct loss to the plaintiffs (i.e., cost of performance is to large compared to the cost of damages for performance to be worthwhile). |
| Rule: | In a coal mining lease, if remedial work is a condition of the contract, it can be skipped if it's the only outstanding term of the contract, if the remedial work is an "incidental provision," and the cost of performing it outweighs the cost of damages. |
| Reasoning: | Plaintiffs should not recover a greater amount than they would have if the contract were performed. The clean-up work was incidental to the main thrust of the contract. |
| Dicta: | Strong dissenting opinion: all costs were foreseeable; to withold performance is to deny the plaintiff a significant element of the benefits agreed to under the contract, and amounts to unjust enrichment of the defendant. |