Category: Contract

Ryanair, chargebacks, unfair terms, and lawful act duress

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| Contract, Contract, Unfair Contract Terms

Ryanair Check In, via Wikipedia (element)

1. Chargebacks

If you pay for a transaction by a debit or card, and there are problems with it, you may be entitled to a chargeback, which is “reversal of a disputed sales transaction on a credit or debit card. … The card provider will decide if you are entitled to a refund based on the circumstances. …”. Assume you booked a flight some time ago, but, on the day of the flight, the destination was one in respect of which Government guidance was, for Covid reasons, that you should not travel. Let us further assume that the flight nevertheless operated, so that it was not cancelled, and the airline refused to refund your ticket price. In those circumstances, you could seek your money back via chargeback from your card provider. In most such circumstances, card providers do indeed decide to make the refund.

Now, let us assume that the airline in question is Ryanair. Article 7 of their Terms and Conditions deals with circumstances where they refuse to carry a passenger; it provides, in part:

Article 7 – Refusing to carry a passenger
7.1
We may refuse to carry you or your baggage on any flights operated by an airline of the Ryanair Group, if one or more of the following circumstances apply, or we have good reason to believe that they may apply.

…

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Hallowe’en special: the Stambovsky v Ackley “Haunted House on the Hudson” is for sale!

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| Contract

1 Laveta Place, Nyack, NY 10960, via Google Streetview (element)Pictured left is 1 Laveta Place, Nyack, New York, NY 10960, a charming riverfront home at the end of a pretty tree-lined cul de sac in an historic village north of New York city. It has recently been put up for sale (realtor; more information). Even accounting for the almost $2m price tag, this would be an unexceptionable sale of a circa-1890 Queen Anne Victorian with panoramic views over the Hudson River, were it not for the property’s central role in Stambovsky v Ackley 572 NYS 2d 672 (NY App Div 1991) (pdf) (blogged here). It has five bedrooms, four bathrooms … and three poltergeists – but when its owner, Helen Ackley, put it up for sale in 1989, she failed to tell buyer Jeffrey Stambovsky about that last detail. The story of the house is extensively told here and here; the defendant, Helen Ackley, is pictured here; and, in an article entitled “Our Haunted House on the Hudson” in the Reader’s Digest for May 1977 (extracted here), she described her family’s experiences of hauntings in the house. Given that she had sought this notoriety, when she later came to sell the house to Stambovsky, she was precluded from denying that it was haunted; and, in the words of Rubin J for the majority in the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York (in a ghost-pun-laden decision), it followed that “as a matter of law, the house is haunted” (there is legal analysis here and here).…

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The legal effects of some butterfly-effect typos; including mistaken offers, and restitution of mistaken payments

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| Contract, Mistaken offers, Mistaken payments, Restitution

The Book of Kells is one of the great treasures in the Old Library in Trinity College Dublin. It is a manuscript of the Four Gospels in Latin based on the Vulgate of St Jerome. It was written and illuminated in the ninth century, probably in part in a monastery on the island of Iona in Scotland, and in part in a monastery in Kells, Co Meath, Ireland. Though a great medieval treasure, it contains some typographical errors. For example, the Gospel of Luke has an extra ancestor in the genealogy of Jesus (Luke 3:26; pictured left). It seems that the scribe read “qui fuit mathathiae” as “qui fuit mathath | iae” and thus wrote “qui fuit mathath” (the first line in the picture on the left) and “qui fuit iae” (the second line in the picture). Even Homer nods.

I was reminded of this when I recently read an article by Tom Lamont about the effects of electronic typos: an SMS misdirected to a wrong mobile phone number (leading to a marriage!); a satnav directed to Rom (in Germany) rather than Rome (in Italy); a jet from Sydney directed to 15 degrees 19.8 minutes east (and landing in Melbourne) rather than 151 degrees 9.8 minutes east) (bound for Kuala Lumpur).…

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Can you get out of the purchase of a house, if you find out later that someone had been murdered in it?

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| Contract

Get directions 16 Stillwell Dr, Wakefield WF2 6RL, UKThe question in the title was provoked by Ciara Kenny‘s House Hunter column in today’s Irish Times, where she ask Would you buy a house someone had been murdered in? I don’t think I would. And if I did, I’d be stuck with it, since the answer to the question in the title to this post is that you can’tget out of the purchase of a house, if you find out later that someone had been murdered in it. Ciara’s column is a diary of her travails trying to purchase a house in Dublin in today’s crazy property market (as she put it on twitter: it’s an effing nightmare). From today’s column:

Every old house has its secrets. Last summer, a gorgeous house came up for sale which we spent weeks deliberating over. But we couldn’t shake a bad feeling we had about the surrounding streets. So when bidding climbed above what we were willing to pay, we were relieved for once. … [Later, my partner found] a decade-old RTÉ news report about a man stabbed to death by a burglar on the stairs. … I don’t think I would be able to shake the image of that poor man’s violent death every time I walked upstairs.

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Stand and deliver, your money or your wife! Of Georgian highwaymen, modern sham marriages, illegal contracts, and abuse of the legal process

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| Contract, Restitution

Two sole traders form a partnership, and then fall out, so that one sues the other for outstanding monies. It is a common enough story now, and was even in the early 1700s. There is normally little of general interest in such case; but, in 1725, the additional facts in Everet v Williams earned it a notoriety that persists to this day, because the plaintiff had sued the defendant for the proceeds of highway robbery, and there had been a classic falling out amongst thieves. Unsurprisingly, the Court declined to lend its aid to the claim, and dismissed the case with costs (see Everet v Williams (1725) reported (1787) 2 European Magazine 360 (pdf) and (1893) 9 Law Quarterly Review 197 (pdf); see also William David Evans (ed) Pothier on Obligations (Strahan, London, 1802, vol 2) 3 (pdf); Nathaniel Lindley A Treatise on the Law of Partnership (1st ed, Johnson & Co, London, 1860) 161 (pdf); Robert Megarry Miscellany-at-Law (Sweet & Maxwell, London, 1955) 76 (pdf); mentalfloss).

The Court’s approach in this case was replicated by Twomey J in English v O’Driscoll [2016] IEHC 584 (25 October 2016), whilst the case itself was cited by Humphreys J in the High Court in KP v The Minister for Justice and Equality [2017] IEHC 95 (20 February 2017).…

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Workplace surveillance, conditions of employment, and privacy

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| Contract, Privacy

Surveillance widgets, by Chris Slane

The Hawthorne effect is alive and well, and living in the interstices between private law and privacy law. In particular, I recently saw the following clause in a contract (the names have been changed to protect the innocent, the guilty, bystanders, and anyone else involved ):

WORKPLACE SURVEILLANCE
The employer’s workplaces are subject to overt workplace surveillance. You agree that you consent to this surveillance which is primarily to ensure the safety and security of the employer’s workplaces and the appropriate use of the employer’s resources. The overt surveillance is in the form of computer, internet usage and camera surveillance and is of an ongoing and continuous nature, in accordance with the employer’s relevant policies as amended from time to time.

This surveillance is carried out by all means available to the employer, which may include accessing your email account; accessing your files; accessing your computer or other electronic devices and recording internet usage by you including remote access internet usage and accessing those records.

The Citizens Information website has a lot of information on the legitimate scope of surveillance in the workplace, and the Data Protection Commissioner has issued Guidance Notes on the Monitoring of Staff, which emphasises that

monitoring, including employees’ email or internet usage, surveillance by camera, video cameras or location data must comply with the transparency requirements of data protection law.

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Valentine’s Mistakes

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| Consumer, Contract, Mistaken offers

Complicated blue valentine; heart via pixabay; complicated via facebookLast month, the Daily Mail website ran a story under the headline: Fury as Tesco offers large bottles of Budweiser for just 14p each on its website – only to cancel orders because the price was a mistake. The offer appeared as a Valentine’s Day special, for beer lovers everywhere. In another example, last Autumn, shoppers on Sears.com noticed that expensive toys (such as kids’ accessories and play sets that cost hundreds of dollars) were available for only $11.95. Nancy Kim on ContractsProf Blog explains many of the contract law consequences of this mistake.

This kind of mistake happens a lot. Sometimes, it’s human error; sometimes, it’s a misfiring algorithm – thus proving the old adage: to err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer (though, some of these errors could be maliciously caused by hacking). And these errors seem particularly headline-grabbing when they involve really cheap tvs or flights. I’ve looked at the legal issues in these situations several times on this blog: see here, here, here, here, here, here and here. …

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The reform of French Contract Law

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| Comparative Law, Contract

codecivil1804coversmall_2I. INTRODUCTION
At lunchtime today, Alexis Downe, lecturer in Toulouse University 1 Capitole and visiting lecturer here in Trinity, gave a staff seminar on “The reform of French Contract Law: a brief overview”. The fundamentals of French private law in general, and of the Law of Contract in particular, are largely unchanged in the Code civil (first edition cover pictured left) since it was adopted in 1804. Nevertheless, there have been significant social changes, from the nineteenth century’s industrial revolution, to the twentieth century’s two world wars, to the twenty-first century’s information age. In many ways, the current process of reform is intended to allow French contract law to catch up with these and other developments. In this post, I provide some background to the current process of reform of French contract law, and then discuss Alexis’s paper.

II. BACKGROUND
Earlier this year, I wrote a post on this blog about French reform of Contract Law in comparative context, constructed around Bénédicte Fauvarque-Cosson‘s article on “The French Contract Law Reform in a European Context” (2014) ELTE Law Journal 59. To the story told in that post should be added the English translation (pdf) (by John Cartwright and Simon Whittaker) of the Catala Avant-projet (pdf) and academic discussions of those drafts in England and France.…

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