Roberts v. Morin, 198 Mont. 233, 645 P.2d 423 (1982)
Legal information, not legal advice. Verify against the cited opinion.
- Citation: 198 Mont. 233, 645 P.2d 423 (1982) (docket No. 81-448; decided May 13, 1982). Reporter pages confirmed against a second independent database; an earlier draft “645 P.2d 1026” was an OCR misread and has been corrected.
- Court / Year: Supreme Court of Montana, 1982.
- Topic tags: forfeiture, remedies, equitable_interest
- Facts: Buyers under a contract for deed defaulted but had paid down principal and made substantial improvements (improvements valued at about 9,500 (1974) to roughly $23,000 (1982). The seller sought to enforce forfeiture.
- Holding: The Montana Supreme Court granted the defaulting buyers relief from forfeiture. Enforcing forfeiture would let the seller recover the property at its greatly increased value plus the benefit of the buyers’ improvements — an unjust enrichment the court would not sanction where the equities favored the buyer.
- Reasoning: Applying Montana’s anti-forfeiture statute (then § 17-102, R.C.M. 1947; now § 28-1-104, MCA), the Court balanced the buyer’s equitable interest built through partial payment and improvements against the seller’s right to enforce the contract, requiring that any relief fully compensate the seller while preventing a windfall. The disparity between the unpaid balance and the appreciated value (plus improvements) was a central equitable factor weighing against forfeiture.
- Practical impact for CFD operators/buyers: A leading Montana illustration that forfeiture of a contract for deed is not automatic — where the buyer has built substantial equity (principal paid + improvements + appreciation), a court sitting in equity can relieve the forfeiture under § 28-1-104 to avoid the seller’s unjust enrichment, conditioned on the buyer making full compensation. Montana’s functional analogue to the skendzel-v-marshall-1973 substantial-equity principle, reached through the relief-from-forfeiture statute rather than mandatory mortgage foreclosure.
- Good-law status: Good law; routinely cited in Montana forfeiture-relief analysis (e.g., weter-v-archambault-2002).
- Source (retrieved): Justia (full opinion PDF), https://cases.justia.com/montana/supreme-court/1982-05-13-DFFD3035-348F-4DEE-BC8A-35FECEC690CD.pdf · Verified: 2026-06-08
Jurisdictions that follow / cite: montana
Disclaimer. Legal information, not legal advice. Confirm the opinion is still good law before relying on it.