#contract #exemption #law

L'Estrange v Graucob [1934] 2 KB 394

FACTS: E signed a printed contract of sale for an automatic vending machine without reading it. The machine proved unsatisfactory and E claimed damages for breach of the implied condition as to fitness for purpose under the Sale of Goods Act 1893 s 14(1). She was met with the defence that one of the printed terms of the sales agreement excluded the implied condition. HELD: The printed term excluded the implied condition under the Act. Since E had signed the contract, it was irrelevant that she had not read it, even though the sales agreement was in 'regrettably small print'.
As fate would have it, counsel for the sellers was one Denning. Shocked by the outcome of the case as well as by the way that the judgment was circulated in the trade, Lord Denning, as he was to become, took on the mantle of champion of the interests of consumers and other vulnerable parties. Thus it was that, for three decades after World War II, it was Denning's Court of Appeal that was in the vanguard of attempts to develop the law in ways that shielded a new class of consumer contractors against the abuse of standard form business practices – most notoriously perhaps by developing the doctrine of fundamental breach, see 11.3.2). As the Prologue explains, this created huge disruptions in the law of contract leading to statutory intervention and, eventually, to the bifurcation of the law so that business-to-consumer dealings were regulated separately from the main body of contract law.