Category: Legal Update

Lord Hoffmann has spent his career clarifying difficult areas of the law. On the centrally important question of how to interpret or construe a document his judgment in Investors Compensation Scheme v West Bromwich Building Society is the key authority. He explained that the role of the court is to discover the meaning which the […]

Proprietary Estoppel, Constructive Trusts & Informal Agreements In the recent (30 July) case of Yeoman’s Row Management Limited v Cobbe (2008) UKHL 55, the House of Lords decided that the Courts below had been so indignant about the unconscionable behaviour of the appellant that they had failed to pay adequate heed to the strict requirements […]

It is becoming increasingly common for the unsuccessful party in litigation to try to argue that it ought not to be paying the successful party’s costs on the basis of a failure to mediate. The case law on that issue is relatively settled (see the judgment of LJ Dyson in Halsey v Milton Keynes General […]