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174
THE LAW OF MOTION PICTURES
anyone else during the contract period.185 The courts will not enforce such a negative covenant even where the guardian or parents and the infant are both parties to the agreement.186
185 Aborn v. Janis (1907), 62 Misc. (N. Y.) 95; 113 N. Y. Supp. 309.
186 Aborn v. Janis (1907), 62 Misc. (N. Y.) 95; 113 N. Y. Supp. 309. The defendant Elsie Janis, an infant, had contracted through her general guardian with the plaintiff for her services as an actress. She subsequently rendered services for one Percy Williams and plaintiff sought to restrain her under a negative covenant. The court, denying the motion, said: “An adult, who was bound to render peculiar and valuable sendees to another, and has agreed to render them for no one else during the term of the contract, will, it is to be assumed, continue to obsene his contract, if restrained from rendering his services to another person; that is, the injunction in its cogent effect upon adult intelligence would result in performance of the contract, and it is for this reason that the courts have adopted the remedy by injunction in cases of contract for personal services as a means
to the desired end — specific performance of the agreement made by the party thus enjoined. But if prior to the attainment of the age of twenty-one years, a person may not ordinarily make a contract because of that absence of mature intelligence which the law presumes to arise from nonage, how may it be said that the infant’s intelligence will be affected by an injunction, as though the wisdom of an adult were present? To determine that such a contract should be specifically enforced by resort to an injunction prohibiting the breach of the negative covenant would be to say, in effect, that the infant, a person lacking sufficient judgment to contract, must yet exercise sufficient judgment as to his or her personal interest to elect between performing a contract not necessarily wisely made, and indeed, presumably unwisely made, or take the harsh alternative of starvation for a refusal to perform at all or for an omission to perform in a satisfactory manner; and all this while the