You are to play the role of an Illinois lawyer by 1) writing a brief and 2) participating in a class moot court appellate hearing. In preparation for completing your assignment, you may talk with other members of the class and other people who are neither law students nor lawyers or paralegals. You may consult any text or library source at your disposal such as the Illinois Statutes. You may share the contents of your brief with other members of the class; however, each member of the class is responsible for submitting his/her own brief bearing his/her signature as affirmation that the brief is the original work of the author.
Your brief should be brief - not more than 1,500 words - and should be typed neatly without erasures, grammatical errors or misspellings. Your brief should comprise a logical syllogism consisting of the following three parts:
Your work will be evaluated on the basis of clear reasoning with
special emphasis on how a court could apply your rationale to later cases
involving similar questions.
Hedda Gabbler entered the Golden Egg minimart to purchase a ticket
in the Illinois Lottery. She filled out a mark-sense card with her lucky
number and gave it to the store clerk, Uriah Heap, - a man of no particular
skill, understanding, experience or education. For example, he was a smoker
- which seems to be a requirement for all minimart clerks. Heap inserted
Hedda's card into a card reader which was part of a computer connected
to the Illinois Lottery Commission's wideband data sales network. He hit
the start key; however, nothing happened because (unknown to Heap and Hedda)
the network was temporarily running at capacity and not accepting new traffic.
When the computer did not respond immediately as it always had done for him, Heap hit the start key five more times. Suddenly, the computer came to life and vended six identical lottery tickets. Heap offered to sell all six tickets to Hedda at the established rate of $1 per ticket. She declined and purchased only one with a single dollar bill that she gave to Heap. Heap put the remaining five tickets into his pocket. He put his own $5 bill into the store's cash-register along with the dollar bill he received from Hedda.
Heap put his $5 bill in the cash register because he was afraid that he would be fired if his error was discovered. He wanted his $5 back so he waited until nobody was looking and sold one each of the tickets to five different customers who did not know each other. He told each of them that the tickets had their Lucky Numbers. Heap pocketed the $5 he received to reimburse himself.
The Golden Egg minimart was owned by Ebenezer Scrouge. Scrouge, in his corporate capacity as president of Golden Egg Corp., entered into a contract with The Illinois Lottery Commission which required that Golden Egg pay for all tickets issued by the sales computer located in the Golden Egg minimart - even those printed in error or by mistake. Refunds and cancellations were expressly prohibited. The contract with The Illinois Lottery Commission also provided for compensating the store in the amount of 1% of all ticket sales plus 10% of all winnings for tickets purchased from Golden Egg. Thus, Golden Egg paid 99% of $5 = $4.95 for the five extra tickets that Hedda refused to purchase.
As luck would have it, Hedda's number won the jackpot - a prize of $12 million. When Hedda went to collect what she thought was her $12 million, she found five other winners - each of whom held a ticket sold by Golden Egg. Further, the serial numbers of all six tickets formed a continuous sequence. From this Hedda concluded that these were the five extra tickets that Heap had tried to sell to her and she demanded that The Illinois Lottery Commission not redeem them. The Illinois Lottery Commission responded by telling Hedda that it had no right to dishonor the five tickets that had been presented properly.
In Illinois, the law is that all lottery tickets are negotiable bearer instruments and are to be paid off upon presentation by the holder to The Illinois Lottery Commission. There is no requirement that The Illinois Lottery Commission make any determination of legal or equitable ownership.
With presence of mind, Hedda called her attorney, Levi Bell, and instructed him to do something! Bell dashed across LaSalle Street and filed suit against Golden Egg, Scrouge and The Illinois Lottery Commission alleging that Hedda was entitled to the entire $12 million. The Circuit Court of Cook County issued an injunction preventing The Illinois Lottery Commission from paying out any of the prize money dispute and the $1.2 million as sales compensation to Golden Egg; however, the Court did permit payment of $2 million in prize to Hedda. Each of the six claimants later filed suit against The Illinois Lottery Commission, Golden Egg and Scrouge. All of the cases have been consolidated for purposes of appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court.
You must elect to be one of the following: