Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: Price Mistake

Mistakes come in several kinds. There are mistakes of fact and mistakes of law, both defined in the Civil Code (sections 1577 and 1578) and slips of the pen or so-called scrivener's errors.

If you wrote $1,200 and meant, say, $1299.99, you probably won't get any relief from a court, whether the mistake was due to forgetting the computer had additional features or due to a typing error. In order to preserve the integrity of the system of negotiating and forming contracts, parties are generally presumed to have read what they put in offers, acceptances and other papers of contractual significance.

There are exceptions in both the Uniform Commercial Code and the common law as set forth in the Restatement (2nd) of Contracts that allow a court to rule the contract unenforceable if enforcement would produce an unconscionable result, e.g., if the computer were clearly worth $12,000, and your error was omitting a zero from the offering price. In such cases, part of the justification for allowing relief from the contract is that the other party should have realized that the offeror was making a mistake.

If by "mistake of value" you mean you underestimated its potential market value due to, for example, not being "up to speed" on market prices for used computers, I think you're not going to prevail in court. Even the famous sterile cow case (Sherwood v. Walker, 66 Mich. 568, 33 N.W. 919 (1887)) that seems to support rescission for mutual mistake as to value was later overruled by the Michigan Supreme Court. Much less likely if mistake is unilateral.