According to Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra (May 12, 1925 – September 22, 2015), late of Montclair, New Jersey, “You can observe a lot by just watching.” That’s how we get our “experience” – by watching what we ourselves have done and by what others have done. We can learn from those experiences, “ours” and “theirs.” That’s one reason we read court decisions. Doing so allows us to safely observe what others have done without getting burned, even when the situations covered by these decisions invoke another Yogiism: “It’s deja vu all over again.”
We came across a late August court decision out of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. It involved a lease dispute at an enclosed mall, one emblematic of the history of such malls. At 300,000 square feet, it opened in 1970 with 32 inline tenants and two department stores as anchors. By 1982, one had disappeared and its parent company soon followed. The following year, a national retailer relocated its own department store from downtown to the now-vacant space. In the mid-1990s, plans were made to expand the mall, based in part on the addition of a third department store building. Some physical impediments delayed those plans and then the contemplated additional department store chain was acquired by yet another. This resulted in a further delay. But, the mall’s expansion opened in 2000, and the mall grew to 700,000 square feet of space. [Read more…]
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We just looked at a court decision about a lease renewal notice and can’t make up our mind what we think about the result or about the wisdom of the issue having been litigated in the first place. We’ll begin with the story and conclude with the “wisdom” part.
What are the rules between a tenant and its landlord after a lease expires? In today’s blog posting, we aren’t exactly thinking about a “holdover” tenancy. In the context of this question, we’ll leave that for another day. [For those who haven’t yet read what we wrote in our November 2012 posting: “Why So Much Confusion About Holdover Tenants?,” it can be seen by clicking here: 
When we first wrote about the loophole in non-waiver clauses that recognizes parties can orally agree to waive such clauses even one that explicitly say that there can be no oral waivers, we got some notes expressing incredulity. After the reality set in, the notes started asking whether there were any limits to this “loophole.” We at Ruminations didn’t know how to answer until we came across a May 12, 2017 decision from the Texas Supreme Court in a case where one of the parties has this name: Boo Nathanial Bradberry. The decision can be seen by clicking: 
Please don’t ask for the central theme of today’s blog posting. We’ve done so already and came up empty-headed. The closest we’ve come is that we’re writing about how a stitch in time saves nine.
Well, another holiday weekend has rolled around. When that happens, we try to stay away from technical or detailed topics and just Ruminate about things that trouble us. We try to throw out some easily digestible thoughts and await the bounce-back. Today’s posting meets those criteria, but after hacking out today’s blog posting, we were haunted by two old quotations. Both are almost certainly wrongly attributed to Samuel Clemens a/k/a Mark Twain. But, that doesn’t make them any less disturbing.
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