LEGAL SKILLS

Legal skills



Legal skills

What is the date of the judgment? (2 marks)

12 November 1987

Who was the trial judge and what was his decision?

Dillon and Bingham LJJ

Where was the case heard at first instance?

Lord Dillon J Spurling Ltd v Bradshaw [1956] 1 WLR 46. Thornton v Shoe Lane Parking Ltd [1971]

Who were counsel and solicitors in the Court of Appeal?

Lord Bingham & Lord Denning's

What remedies were Interfoto Picture Library Ltd seeking in the Court of Appeal?

Interfoto delivered 47 transparencies, which was a number the defendants had not specifically asked for. Condition 2 contained a daily rate per transparency after the initial period of 14 days many times greater than was usual or (so far as the evidence shows) heard of. For these 47 transparencies there was to be a charge for each day of delay of £235 plus value added tax. The result would be that a venial period of delay, as here,

would lead to an inordinate liability.

Which cases were applied by the Court of Appeal?

The defendants are not to be relieved of that liability because they did not read the condition, although doubtless they did not; but in my judgment they are to be relieved because the plaintiffs did not do what was necessary to draw this unreasonable and extortionate clause fairly to their attention. I would accordingly allow the defendants' appeal and substitute for the judge's award the sum which he assessed upon the alternative basis of quantum meruit.

7. In what court was McCutcheon v David MacBrayne Ltd [1964] 1 All ER 430 heard?

Once the jiffy bag was opened and the transparencies taken out with the delivery note, it is in my judgment an inescapable inference that the defendants would have recognised the delivery note as a document of a kind likely to contain contractual terms and would have seen that there were conditions printed in small but visible lettering on the face of the document.

What are the material facts of Interfoto Picture Library v Stiletto Visual Programmes

In many civil law systems, and perhaps in most legal systems outside the common law world, the law of obligations recognises and enforces an overriding principle that in making and carrying out contracts parties should act in good faith. This does not simply mean that they should not deceive each other, a principle which any legal system must recognise; its effect is perhaps most aptly conveyed by such metaphorical colloquialisms as “playing fair,” “coming clean” or “putting one's cards face upwards on the table.”

9. Why did Dillon LJ not consider if Condition 2 was a penalty

Hid Lordship held that the fee clause was a “very onerous clause, such that the “defendants could not conceivably have known, if their attention was not drawn to the clause, that the plaintiffs were proposing to charge a “holding fee” for the retention of the transparencies at such a very high and exorbitant rate.

What does Dillon LJ suggest would have been the effect of Condition ...