A law student entering the profession can attract attention for various reasons but publicly proving a prominent lawyer wrong and then suing him for a million dollars is unusual.

During an interview on national television, Cheney Mason, a leading defence lawyer in Florida, was protesting that the multiple murder case against his convicted client was flawed. He said his client, who had been sentenced to death, could not, as the prosecution alleged, have killed three people in Florida at 17.20 one day and still have appeared on CCTV in a hotel in Atlanta at 10.00pm that day. Mason also declared it was impossible for anyone to disembark from an aircraft in Atlanta airport and get to the hotel five miles away in less than 28 minutes. He then said “I challenge anybody to show me, I’ll pay them a million dollars if they can do it.”

Watching that interview was Dustin Kolodziej, a law student from Texas who later rose to the challenge. Filming himself, he retraced the route used by the murderer. He flew from Atlanta to Orlando (where the killings took place) and back again, and he completed the final airport to hotel leg within 28 minutes. He claimed the $1 million from Mason on the basis that he had completed a “unilateral contract”.

In most contracts the parties agree on terms but in a unilateral contract one party makes an offer, like a reward for the return of lost property, and the other party, a stranger, can complete the contract by simply doing what is asked. Mason refused to pay the $1m. Kolodziej, who recently graduated, has now sued Mason in the federal court in Texas.

To win, Kolodziej will have to prove that a reasonable person in his position would have assumed Mason’s $1m offer was serious. The courts have previously rejected some extravagant unilateral contract claims. In 1996, a Pepsi television advert depicted, along with sun glasses and a leather jacket, a real Harriet fighter jet (cost: $23m) as among the goods claimable with tokens from purchasing drinks. John Leonard sued PepsiCo for the jet when the company wouldn’t redeem seven million ‘Pepsi points’ he’d acquired for $700,000. The court ruled the fighter jet offer was just in jest. But claimants have sometimes succeeded. In 1967, the Jesse James museum curator asserted that the desperado was not killed in 1882 but lived with him in Missouri until the 1950s. On national television he said he’d pay $10,000 to anyone who proved him wrong. A relative of James did so and she won her claim to the money.

A most curious “I’ll pay if you prove me wrong” case was decided in England in 1892. The Carbolic Smoke Ball Company promised to pay £100 to anyone who used its product but caught the flu. Elizabeth Carlill, bought the Smoke Ball, used it, got the flu, and won damages. She enjoyed a long life and died fifty years later aged 96, unfortunately, from flu.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at the Open University, English Law by Slapper & Kelly is published by Routledge-Cavendish

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at the Open University. His book How the Law Works is published by HarperCollins

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