Analyze the issue based on the following criteria:
The personal representatives of the plaintiff’s estate hired an appraiser to appraise personal property in preparation for an estate sale. The appraiser told the representatives that she was no judge of fine art and that they would have to hire an additional appraiser if she found any fine art. She did not report finding any fine art, and relying on her silence, the repre-sentatives priced and sold two oil paintings at $ 60. The defendant came to the estate sale and bought the paintings. Although he had bought and sold some art before, he was not an educated purchaser and had made no more than $ 55 on any art that he had previously sold; he had bought many paintings that ended up being forgeries. He assumed that the paintings were not originals, given their price and the fact that professionals were managing the sale, but he liked the subject matter of one and the frame of the other. Once home with the paintings, he compared their signatures to those in a book of artists’ signatures and thought they looked like those of Martin Johnson Head. As he had done with other art, he sent photos of the paintings to Christie’s in New York, which confirmed the signa-tures and offered to auction the paintings for him. The auction netted the defendant $ 911,000. After finding out what had happened, the estate sued the defendant buyer, alleging that the contract should have been rescinded on grounds of mutual mistake and unconscionability. The trial court granted sum-mary judgment in favor of the defendant, and the plaintiff appealed.
How do you think the appellate court ruled, and why? [ Estate of Martha Nelson v. Carl Rice and Anne Rice, 12 P. 3d 238, 2000 LEXIS APP 159 ( 2000).]
