TO WHAT EXTENT DOES THE DECISIONS MADE IN THE

To what extent does the decisions made in the Williams V Roffrey Bros case

Contract Law Consideration Williams V Roffrey Bros case challenge the traditional rules of consideration?

In Williams v Roffey Bros (1991) a carpentry sub-contractor underpriced work for a number of flats and then experienced difficulties completing. In order to speed things up, the main contractor promised an additional payment for each completed flat. The court held that the extra money was payable even though the contractor was doing no more than he had agreed to do in the first place. The main distinction between these two cases is the element of threat. In the Carillion case, the subcontractors threatened a clear breach of contract. In the Williams case, the sub-contractors made no such threat, they just told it like it was. When the courts are faced with a plea that an agreement was reached only as a result of economic duress, they have to consider not only the threat, but also its legitimacy. (Bradley A. W. & Ewing K., 2003. Pp. 14)

Threatening to do something that is within your lawful rights in order to drive a hard bargain will not normally amount to duress. The victim needs also to demonstrate that the threat left them with no practical alternative but to capitulate. Otherwise almost every commercial contract could be undone on the basis that when faced with an offer to provide a service for the cheapest price within the shortest time the contracting party had no alternative but to accept if they wanted to achieve the desired result. In answer to the plea 'they made me do it', the court will respond, 'yes, but were they entitled to?' Costs in Adjudication Increasingly the lie is being put to the notion that adjudication provides rough and ready justice, quickly and cheaply. It may be rough and ready. Whether it is justice depends upon your standpoint. Just as the definition of an easy question can only be, one to which you know the answer, whether an adjudicator got it right will depend entirely on whether they found in your favour. Even viewed objectively, the plethora of cases in which the courts have unpicked adjudicators' decisions for breach of natural justice, suggests that justice is not always seen to be done, or in some cases, done at all.

Adjudications are not necessarily conducted quickly; in fact most adjudicators will allow the parties as long as they like to exchange layer after layer of submissions, building up like a compost heap of disparate ideas from which the adjudicator is expected to extract, good organic reasoning. And the cost? Well there is the rub. Not only is adjudication protracted and formless, but the requirement to produce a lot of detailed information in impossibly impractical time limits is like a blank cheque to lawyers and construction consultants alike. The most important rule of law with regard to consideration is that it need not be ...