Unless there is something in the lease there is none.
The courts should enforce actual contracts, not contracts people wished they had signed.
This goes double for the Constitution and why we should give progressivism the heave ho down to the FDR era.
There’s an interesting thing buried near the bottom of the article: Teavana wants to terminate the leases early.
So it seems to be a very sick company (Teavana) which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a very profitable company (Starbucks) trying to escape from the costs of valid lease contracts. The other party to the contracts (Simon Property Group) is not on the brink of ruin, but they aren’t healthy either. Loss of the Teavana income would clearly hurt them financially.
It seems to me that Starbucks either knew about these leases when they bought Teavana, or the leases have been renewed on Starbucks watch. Starbucks wants to stick SPG with the cost of a bad decision, but Starbucks evidently has no bankruptcy-related reason to deserve such a sweet deal.
If a company were allowed to package up its liabilities in a cash-strapped subsidiary, and then claim that the subsidiary is broke so the liabilities should be cancelled, what good would a contract be?
I haven’t read the judge’s decision, so I may have the wrong impression. But it seems to me that the decision may be perfectly reasonable.