In re Kaufman
Supreme Court of Oklahoma
37 P.3d 845 (2001)
John Kaufman (defendant) received a structured wrongful-death settlement stream that expressly denied him "the power to sell, mortgage, encumber or anticipate the future payments by assignment or otherwise," yet he sold 60 monthly payments to J.G. Wentworth (Wentworth) (plaintiff) for a lump sum; the payments to Wentworth stopped within a year, and Kaufman filed for bankruptcy, listing the Wentworth agreement as an unsecured claim. When Wentworth sought relief from the automatic stay to seize the annuity payments, Kaufman argued the purchase agreement was invalid because the settlement's anti-assignment restriction barred him from ever assigning the payments.
Whether a party who assigns his right to future payments, despite a clear contractual restriction on his power to assign, may later assert against his own assignee that the assignment is void because it violated that restriction.