Excessive Cost to the Court - May courts, in their discretion, opt to not order specific performance when monitoring the defendant’s compliance would be very costly for the court?

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Hypothetical - United Migrant Workers (UMW) supplies workers to farms in California. Under its contract with the farms, the farms agree not to hire illegal aliens as laborers. UMW sues 1,000 farms spread throughout California for breaching this provision and requests specific performance in each case.

The court consolidates the cases into a single case, UMW v. 1000 Farms. (Note: There is no such case; the example is fictional.)

Imagine the court grants specific performance in 1000 Farms.

True or false - In the case of any one farm worker, the court can easily determine whether the farm complied with the order: the worker is either legally in the United States, or the worker is not.

Answer and Analysis - True. A given worker either is or is not legally in the country. The situation differs in this way from the Chicago Opera/Pavarotti example, where it would be difficult to determine whether Pavarotti performed poorly on purpose or was simply not in good voice.

Would the answer differ if the court were confronted with the task of monitoring compliance in 1000 different farms? We address that question in our next post on this topic.

The Law School Experience - These and related topics are covered in our tutorials on Contract Remedies.

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