A New York Supreme Court judge dismissed the claims filed against the Metropolitan Museum of Art over whether its admissions policy was inconsistent with city law and the museum’s charter. Lost in many of the headlines, however, is that the entire lawsuit was not dismissed; another claim for misrepresentation is, for the moment, still alive.
The Met gained its present location as part of an agreement with the City of New York and 19th-century statutes that together provide that the museum may stay rent-free only so long as it is open to the public free of charge on multiple days each week. At some point, the Met began soliciting voluntary donations from visitors even on those free days. Theodore Grunewald and Patricia Nicholson, the plaintiffs in the first of the two lawsuits claimed that the signs in the museum and the links on the website are misleading in that they suggest a mandatory admission fee, and that the Met has intentionally misled the public to that effect. A second suit earlier this year make substantially the same allegations on behalf of a different group of plaintiffs (Filip Saska, TomášNadrchal, and Stephen Michelman). Whereas the Met largely stayed silent after the first filing, it issued a forceful press release and later moved to dismiss the case. We discussed earlier this year the hurdles that these claims faced.
On Tuesday, the Manhattan County Supreme Court agreed. This was a motion to dismiss, meaning that the Court assessed the legal viability of the claims while assuming for argument’s sake that all the factual allegations made were true (though numerous exhibits seem to have been submitted both in support of and in opposition to the motions, which ordinarily does not happen at this stage). Judge Shirley Werner Kornreich noted the extensive historical correspondence with the city itself in which the admissions policy was discussed, and held that the record compelled the conclusion that the city knew of and approved of the policy.
A third party beneficiary is someone whom a contract contemplates will be benefitted in some way, and that person ordinarily has standing to bring a claim to enforce the contract (like the beneficiary of an insurance contract, for example). The plaintiffs here claimed to be beneficiaries of the Met’s lease contract with the city of New York. Since the city was not a party, and the court considered whether the plaintiffs even had standing to bring the claims as third-party beneficiaries. The Court found that they are not. Although the Met’s arrangement was clearly designed to benefit the public, that does not convert every member of the public into a third-party beneficiary.
The second question was whether the statute authorizing this arrangement allowed citizens to bring suit, in what is called a “private right of action.” Caselaw has become extremely strict in recent years to hold that unless a statute unambiguously indicates its intention to allow for private suits, they are not permitted. Here, what was relied on was in fact an appropriations act, and it is long settled that an individual does not have standing to sue based on his or her unhappiness with the nature of expenditures.
This ruling does not affect the misrepresentation-based claims filed by the plaintiffs, and it does not mean that the judge came to believe that the Met was, in fact, justified in its policy (it may have been, but the court never reached that question since it did not have to). The view here, however, is that those remaining claims face a tall hurdle to survive (a plaintiff must prove that the defendant made a statement of fact that the defendant knew to be false when he made it, for the purpose of inducing the plaintiff into doing something that that plaintiff reasonably did under the circumstances, to the plaintiff’s detriment. In other words, if the statement was true, if the reliance by the plaintiff was not reasonable, or if the plaintiff was not harmed, there can be no claim).
It is likely a coincidence, but the city and the Met only recently announced some changes to the Met lease that would foreclose these claims in the future (but which could not, had there been a valid claim, done so retroactively):
“In addition to confirming the existing admission policy first introduced in 1971, and regularly modified with the approval of City administrations in the years since, the new amendment authorizes the museum, should the need arise, to consider a range of admission modifications in future years, subject as in the past to review and approval by the City.”
Lastly, for whatever it is worth, when I stopped in at the Met two weeks ago, the woman at the kiosk told me very politely several times that I did not have to pay anything.
