A diamond engagement ring in the display case of Tiffany and Co. in Boston. (Photo by Jennifer Smith)
Justices at the state’s highest court appear open to doing away with the traditional approach to answering a very niche question: Should it matter whose fault it is when an engagement goes sour, even with a $70,000 diamond ring on the line?
During arguments in the case of Bruce Johnson and Caroline Settino – with a pricey Tiffany & Co. engagement ring and engraved wedding bands at stake – Supreme Judicial Court justices were frank about their dismay at being asked to rummage around in romantic relationship details to determine whether an engagement ring should be treated a unique kind of gift subject to a unique kind of legal analysis.
“This old rule seems old fashioned and kind of silly,” Justice Scott Kafker said.
The “old rule” in question is that an engagement ring is a special kind of gift offered in the promise of marriage that should be returned to the giver unless the giver is “at fault” in the breakup.
Johnson was unhappy with what he described in filings as worsening treatment by his fiancée, plus text messages and voicemails that made him think she was having an affair. He called the wedding off and asked for the return of the engagement ring and wedding bands.
So was the breakup his fault, requiring him to forfeit the ring?
A lower court said yes, in part because Johnson “predominantly” based the decision on what the court determined were unsubstantiated allegations of infidelity. But the Appeals Court disagreed, instead concluding that Johnson’s desire to end the relationship was justifiable based on its souring and his suspicion of an affair, leaving no one at fault.
“I think one of the concerns that I have here is we’ve never really animated what the metric ought to be for fault,” Justice Serge Georges told Johnson’s attorney when the case was argued on Friday. “And your position is that there should be a justification kind of analysis, where you look at not just who actually pulled the lever, but factor in why.”
Massachusetts was once in good company with its fault-based analysis regarding engagement ring law. As more states embraced no-fault divorce, however, the majority of them came to embrace a faultless angle on engagements as well – meaning the ring should be returned to the giver regardless of who calls it off.
An extended back-and-forth between some of the justices and Settino’s attorney Nick Rosenberg probed the reality of trying to figure out if courts are suited to determine whether it took being right about an affair to end a relationship.
Supreme Judicial Court to decide who gets $70,000 ring after engagement called off
“Let’s say that your partner lies to you a thousand times,” Georges said, “and 999 of those times they actually lied to you. But the thousandth time, they actually didn’t lie to you. It was actually the truth.”
The trial judge seemed to say, Georges told Rosenberg, that all the other times that Settino was rude or dismissive of Johnson were upsetting, but the important thing was that he was wrong about the affair.
Is it fair to leave because he was unhappy with a number of other issues, the justices mulled? Should Johnson have tried to talk it through rather than break up via voicemail, as Rosenberg suggested?
“It seems to me that this discussion is a ‘see e.g.’ (supportive example) as to why we have to move to the no-fault,” Justice Dalila Wendlant ultimately interrupted.
Justices toyed with the question of what is so special about an engagement ring in the first place. Engagement ring return is a rare area of law that imposes conditions or promises on engagements, even after states in the last century began abolishing “heart balm” claims under which women could file suit for broken promises of marriage.
Both Johnson and Settino are asking the court to find that one of the lower courts ruled correctly, deciding fault in their specific favor, plus adopt a new rule for deciding what happens to an engagement ring if the relationship is cut off.
Stephanie Taverna-Siden, Johnson’s attorney, argued that the “most equitable” rule is for the person who first bought or owned the ring to have it returned, because by making it a straightforward gift, “that person that gave the ring loses the value of the ring if the marriage doesn’t happen.”
Wendlandt cut in. “But if it was a tennis bracelet?” she asked.
“Or a car?” Kafker suggested.
“Why is it the ring?” Wendlandt asked.
The ring has “special value in our society, traditionally,” Taverna-Siden argued.
“But no one wants to keep the ring,” Kafker said, “and the ring is no longer a symbol of love. It’s a symbol of the thing that broke down.”
“Unless it’s worth $70,000,” Justice Frank Gaziano offered, to chuckles from the bench.
Essentially, Kafker said, “it’s cash.”
Johnson’s team would like the court to adopt the no-fault conditional gift rule for engagement rings used in most states, with Taverna-Siden arguing that rings are understood to be an exchange in anticipation of – conditioned on, in her interpretation – marriage. No state that she is aware of recognizes a regular practice of offering a car in exchange for marriage, for instance. But exchanging rings is commonplace.
That reading of the law would also be most efficient for the courts, Taverna-Siden said.
“It helps the judicial economy to say that in this specific circumstance, this is the rule: No-fault. Donor gets the ring back. It’s the most equitable and it avoids litigation. These parties have been in litigation for six years, and their relationship was only a year and a half.”
But Settino’s team wants to simplify the question even further – take condition out of the equation. The court could, Rosenberg said, adopt a rule that a gift is a gift, even if it’s a wedding ring. Even if social norms mean that engagement rings are understood generally as in exchange for marriage.
At least some of the justices seemed interested in examining whether or not the state generally allows conditional gifts at all, which Rosenberg argues it does not. Justice Bessie Dewar offered an example of promising a child $20 for good behavior and then taking it back if the child misbehaved. Chief Justice Kimberly Budd wondered, “can the guy get the ring back if he says, ‘Here, I want you to wear this in anticipation of our marriage?’”
Rosenberg likened the latter to placing something in trust, rather than making a conditional gift.
Johnson’s team is arguing, Rosenberg said, that “societal norms hold that the engagement ring is symbolic of this pledge, this promise to marry, then implies that condition into it, even though it’s not expressed by the parties. And if that condition is breached, the ring then goes back. But the elephant in the room is what’s this condition that’s being read into it: It’s that someone is going to marry you.”
Massachusetts’ law abolishing heart balm claims establishes that breaching a promise to marry is not an injury recognized by law.
Rosenberg argued that carving engagement rings out of the heart balm laws was a “legal fiction” created by the De Cicco v. Barker case in 1959, just five years after the state of Massachusetts passed laws to allow married women rights over personal property and removed some barriers to divorce. Conditional engagement rings, Settino’s filings argue, are a legacy of an out-of-date system of gender and marital roles.
“We don’t enforce marriage broker contracts,” Kafker said. “We don’t impose fault in divorce. We’ve said we don’t wanna encourage bad engagements or bad marriages. We wanna stay out of that business, right? So conditional gifts can be fine, but not conditioned on marriage, right? That was probably the error in De Cicco .”
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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