Titles in the Core Text series take the reader straight to the heart of the subject, providing focused, concise, and reliable guides for students at all levels. This chapter examines undue influence in a contract, which is a vitiating factor and also a ground of restitution. It explains that undue influence is hard to define and can more easily be recognised when found than exhaustively analysed in the abstract. This chapter investigates how undue influence is proved by means of a rebuttable presumption based on a relationship of trust and confidence coupled with a transaction that calls for an explanation, and how the resulting presumption is rebutted. It then covers the remedy of rescission for undue influence. Finally, it explores undue influence in three-party cases, where relief depends on whether the contracting party had notice, actual or constructive, of the undue influence and whether it had taken reasonable steps.
Chapter
11. Undue influence
Chapter
Royal Bank of Scotland v Etridge (No.2) [2001] UKHL 44
Essential Cases: Contract Law provides a bridge between course textbooks and key case judgments. This case document summarizes the facts and decision in Royal Bank of Scotland v Etridge (No. 2) [2001] UKHL 44. The document also includes supporting commentary from author Nicola Jackson.
Chapter
11. Undue influence
Titles in the Core Text series take the reader straight to the heart of the subject, providing focused, concise, and reliable guides for students at all levels. This chapter examines undue influence in a contract, which is a vitiating factor and also a ground of restitution. It explains that undue influence is hard to define and can more easily be recognised when found than exhaustively analysed in the abstract. This chapter investigates how undue influence is proved by means of a rebuttable presumption based on a relationship of trust and confidence coupled with a transaction that calls for an explanation, and how the resulting presumption is rebutted. It then covers the remedy of rescission for undue influence. Finally it explores undue influence in three-party cases, where relief depends on whether the contracting party had notice, actual or constructive, of the undue influence and whether it had taken reasonable steps.
Chapter
3. Contracts of employment (2): content and wages
Ian Smith, Owen Warnock, and Gemma Mitchell
This chapter explores where express terms come from, especially if they are not all neatly set out in writing, and then goes on to consider how terms become implied. Here, several significant differences between ordinary commercial contracts and employment contracts will be seen, both in the scale of the use of implied terms in employment law to ‘perfect’ the bargain and in the sheer strength of some of these frequently implied terms that can, in practice, be just as important as express terms. Having looked at where these terms come from, the chapter goes on to consider the principal duties that they impose on employers and employees, some of which are old and obvious, such as the employer’s duty to pay wages and the employee’s duty of obedience to lawful orders. On the other hand, some are more recent and more at the cutting edge of modern employment law, such as the implied term of trust and confidence for the employee and the topical controversies over confidentiality at work in an age of electronic communication and social media. The chapter concludes by considering specifically the law on wages, including the statutory requirements of paying the national minimum wage and the national living wage.
