Teaching Sales, Issue 1: Mixed Contracts Under the UCC
As indicated in Monday’s post, I am teaching Sales for the first time this semester, and this is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts in which I highlight but do not resolve tricky issues addressed in the course.
The situation is quite common. A contract involves the provision of both services and goods: a construction contract covers both building supplies and labor costs; a medical contract covers both the costs of the surgery and the prosthetic device to be inserted in toto the body; a software company will both design and maintain the software, while also providing computer hardware to run it. Are these transactions covered under Article 2?
Most courts seem to favor a version of the “predominant purpose” test, although it goes by various names. In such cases, the court’s analysis aims to determine whether the contract is predominantly one for goods or one for services. But what does it mean to have services of goods predominate? It could mean that the parties thought of the contract as one for good or as one for services, in which case the inquiry will largely turn on the parties’ testimony, although if the contract is named “Sercies Agreement” or “Purchase Agreement” that might help. Or the court might have to look to which component counted for a larger portion of the contract price.
Where a contract has a mixof goods and services, relevant criteria for determining whether the UCC willcontrol a contract will include the contract language, the nature of theseller’s business, the reason for entering the contract, and the amountscharged under the contract for the goods and services.
Fleet Business Credit, LLC v. Grindstaff, Inc., 2008 WL 2579231(Tenn. Ct. App. 2008). But the fact that the test is multi-factor and nuanced only renders it more problemmatic in my view, on which more below.
Other courts use the gravamen of the action test. They look not to what the contract as a whole was about but to whether the issues in the case relate to faulty service or faulty goods. So, for example, I am using the Whaley & McJohn casebook on sales, which includes a Maryland case about a faulty diving board installed as part of the installation of an in-ground pool. The case related not to the installation of the pool but to the design of the board, which was slippery on the end. The court applied the gravamen of the action test and found that the UCC applied.
The gravamen of the action test seems right to me, and I’m surprised that more states have not adopted it. Predominant purpose is vague and hard to apply, and it seems artibtrary that whether or not a contractor’s work should be covered on a warranty should turn on whether 45% of 55% of the cost was related to the provision of goods. Moreover, the fact that a party sold a good as part of a services contract should not affect the warranties that run with the sale of a good. And on the other side, if there was a failure in the services provided in connection with a provision of goods, then the warranties that relate to the goods should not be relevant in an assessment of whether or not the service provider was at fault.
The gravamen rule also seems better to me in terms of putting the parties on notice of potential liabilities in store. Faced with a multi-factor test like the predominant purpose test, parties to mixed contracts cannot know in advance whether their contract will be governed by the UCC or not. If the gravamen rule applies, parties should always know that the UCC will apply to the goods portion of the contract. And if a service provider wants to protect itself from liability relating to the goods it installs, that legal certainty can be very valuable.
[JT]