Engagement Ring in KS..does she give it back when she broke it off?

[JohnBLZ]

I'm a 24 year old male in KS...My fiance` called off our engagement and is now refusing to give the engagement ring back...do I have any legal right to it?

 

[I AM ALWAYS LIABLE]

I'm a 24 year old male in KS...My fiance` called off our engagement and is now refusing to give the engagement ring back...do I have any legal right to it?

The engagement is broken. Long after the heartbreak has healed, one nagging question often remains: Who gets to keep the ring?
The engagement, started by candlelight, soft words and promises to wed, is over. In addition to the sorrow, the heartbroken must deal with explanations to friends and relations and the return of the deposits left with the caterer, the florist and the dressmaker.

But when all that dust has cleared, one rankling question often remains: Who gets to keep the ring? For the answer -- or for vengeance -- many turn to the legal system. There are more than a hundred cases now on the books in which courts grappled with the mysteries of the human heart and tried to determine who should keep the ring. Some of these battles were hard fought, going all the way to the supreme courts of their states -- the final stopping point for questions of state law, like this one.

State courts around the nation that have considered the ring issue have reached differing conclusions. And such controversies that have made it all the way to court have had a similar, almost Victorian tone: It is the men who give rings; the women who receive them, and the courts that seek a just determination of rights and wrongs. Real life, of course, can be more complex than that and both women and men can give rings, sometimes to each other. The legal principals in these cases apply to all couples facing this question, regardless of who bought and who received the ring.

When Is a Gift a Gift?
Courts generally treat the engagement ring as a gift, from the donor (the person who gave the ring) to the donee (the person who received it). To find a legal gift, a court looks for three things: the donor's intent to give the ring as a gift; the donor's delivery of it to the donee and the donee's acceptance of the item. If the person to whom the ring was given can show all three elements, the ring is considered a gift to him or her.
Gifts With a Twist
But the majority of courts also consider such a gift to be a conditional one. That means that until some future event occurs, the gift isn't final; if that event does not occur, then the donor has the right to get the gift back. In real life, many parents overuse this idea by, for example, giving a teenage daughter the keys to the family car, on the condition that she maintain a certain gradepoint average for a specified period of time. If she doesn't make the grade, the keys must be returned.
Women who want to keep their engagement rings often argue that the condition needed to make the engagement ring a final gift is simply the acceptance of the proposal of marriage, not the completion of the marriage ceremony. That way, if the engagement is broken, the ring remains her property.

But this argument often loses. The majority of courts find that the gift of an engagement ring contains an implied condition of marriage; acceptance of the proposal is not the underlying "deal." Absent some other understanding -- say, that the ring is merely a memento of a great trip to Hawaii -- most courts look at engagement rings as conditional gifts given in contemplation of marriage: "Once it is established the ring is an engagement ring, it is a conditional gift." Heiman v. Parrish, 942 P.2d 632, 633 (Kan. 1997).

Pointing (Ring) Fingers
When divining who gets to keep the engagement ring, courts do not agree whether or not it should matter who did the breaking up or why. To some judges, it isn't fair that the donor should always get the ring back, especially if the donee stood ready to go ahead with the marriage. The same judges think it would be unfair for the donee to keep the ring if the engagement was broken because of his or her unfaithfulness or other wrongdoing. In such cases, they order that the ring should return to its purchaser.
Other judges, though, think that the whole matter of who broke up with whom isn't any of their business. If the wedding's off, they say, the donor should get the ring back, regardless of who, why, where, or when the engagement ended. After all, they reason, no-fault divorce makes it possible for marriages to end without bitter court fights over whose fault it was; engagements should be treated the same way.

Recently, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania stuck steadfastly to the no-fault reasoning and decreed that the donor should always get the ring back if the engagement is broken off, regardless of who broke it off or why. Lindh v. Surman 1999 WL 1073639. Iowa, Kansas, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Wisconsin have the same rule. Heiman v. Parrish, 942 P.2d 631, 636 (Kan. 1997). The alternative rule, and still the majority approach, is that a donor who breaks off the engagement for a reason that has nothing to do with the donee's behavior cannot recover the ring. This is the fault-based rule.

Justices on the Supreme Court of Kansas, which also adopted the no-fault rule in 1997, detailed the difficulties that they imagined would be theirs with a fault-based approach:

hould courts be asked to determine which of the following grounds for breaking an engagement is fault or justified? (1) The parties have nothing in common; (2) one party cannot stand prospective in-laws; (3) a minor child of one of the parties is hostile to and will not accept the other party; (4) an adult child of one of the parties will not accept the other party: (5) the parties' pets do not get along; (6) a party was too hasty in proposing or accepting the proposal; (7) the engagement was a rebound situation which is now regretted; (8) one party has untidy habits that irritate the other; or (9) the parties have religious differences.
Heiman v. Parrish, 942 P.2d 631, 637 (Kan. 1997).
In New Jersey, a court rejected a rule that required a determination of fault, declaring it "sexist and archaic." The court looked to the history of ancient Rome, where a woman who broke off an engagement was required to return not only the ring, but also its value as a penalty. And it also cited England, where a man was required to give the woman the ring if he broke the engagement in recognition of the fact that he had just ruined her reputation and her prospects. The court concluded that "the rule of life was the rule of law -- both saw women as inferiors." Aronow v. Silver, 538 A.2d 851 (1987).

The fault rule might be archaic, it might be sexist, but judges who use it think that justice can't be done without a complete understanding of what went wrong. They might have a point. Consider the case of George J. Pavlicic, a 75-year-old man, who had a romance with Sara Jane Mills, aged 26. They became engaged in 1949. He bought her a house, two cars, an engagement ring, and a diamond ring in anticipation of their marriage. George then lent her a significant amount of money, including $5,000 to buy a saloon. Sara Jane then disappeared. The next time she was heard from, she had indeed used the $5,000 to buy a saloon, but it was in another city, and she had married another man, two years younger than she was.

George went to court. He wanted everything that he'd given Sara Jane back. He won. But Sara Jane argued on appeal that a new law, the Heart-Balm Act, made his lawsuit illegal. The Act outlawed all legal actions for "breaches of contract to marry." The Pennsylvania Supreme Court sided with George. The Act, it held, was aimed at "exaggerated and fictional claims of mortification and anguish purportedly attendant upon a breach of promise to marry." It was meant to end a kind of legal blackmail, where people threatened lawsuits for breach of the promise to marry that would tarnish the other person's reputation; lawsuits scary enough to force a settlement, even from innocent people.

But the Act, the court concluded, didn't alter the rule of conditional gifts. "The title to the gifts which Sara Jane received, predicated on the assurances of marriage with George, never left George and could not leave him until the marital knot was tied. It would appear from all the evidence that the knot was fully formed and loosely awaiting the ultimate pull which would take title in the gifts from George to Sara Jane, but the final tug never occurred and the knot fell apart, with the gifts legally falling back into the domain of the brideless George . . . To allow Sara Jane to retain the money and property which she got from George by dangling before him the grapes of matrimony which she never intended to let him pluck would be to place a premium on trickery, cunning, and duplicitous dealing."
Pavlicic v. Vogtsberger, 136 A.2d 127, 130 (Penn. 1957)

Some courts applying this fault-based rule consider the exchange of the ring to be more like a contract than a conditional gift: the ring is just a symbol of the agreement to marry. If that agreement is not performed, then those involved should be restored to their former positions -- as they would be if the contract was for, say, the delivery of a bushel of wheat -- and the ring should be returned to the person who first had it. But if the donor backs out, the donee should keep the ring, because a person who breaches contracts should not be rewarded for doing so. Spinnell v. Quigley, 785 P.2d 1149 (1990).

 

[JohnBLZ]

thank you...I greatly appreciate your response...and btw I got the ring back today...