New York Telephone Co. v. State

OPINION OF THE COURT

Gerard M. Weisberg, J.

Claimant, New York Telephone Company (New York Tel.), seeks recovery for telephone services furnished to the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Stony Brook), owned and operated by the defendant, State of New York.

For an unspecified number of years, individuals associated with Stony Brook were able to place phone calls from outside the campus grounds and charge them to the university’s number. These were referred to as "third-party calls”. Late in 1977, Stony Brook began deducting charges for those calls from its phone bills, asserting that…