Category: Contract

Is an online deal for a €98 tv too good to be true?

| 7 Comments
| Contract, Mistaken offers

Arnotts logoAn item in the Readers’ Queries feature on the Consumer page in last week’s Irish Times caught my eye, not least because it raised very interesting issues about ordering goods online:

Online TV deal too good to be true

A reader was on the Arnotts website recently pricing televisions when he found a 42” model for €1,498. According to the site it had a discount of €1,400. “A TV for €98? Where could I go wrong? So I put in my Laser card details, expecting to be told the order could not be processed due to a pricing error but no, it went through. I got a confirmation e-mail a few minutes later with an order number,” he writes.

He “kept checking the tracking of the order on their web page and it said the order was processed and waiting for a delivery date. Later that evening I got an e-mail saying they had made an error in pricing and my order was cancelled.”

The incident has left him curious. “Since Arnotts never took any money from my account but did issue the order number, do they have to honour the order or are they completely within their rights to cancel it?

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Can you recover taxes and charges from airlines when you don’t travel?

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| Airline charges, Consumer, Contract, Restitution

Small palm tree, via Steve Hedley's restitution siteYes, you can. If you book to travel with an airline, and pay their fee plus government taxes and airport charges, but if you then don’t travel, so that the taxes are not due and the charges are not incurred, you are entitled to recover those taxes and charges from the airline. If the contract between you and the airline contains a clause either making them irrecoverable or imposing disproportionately high administration fees to recover them, that clause is unenforceable (on foot of the European Communities (Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts) Regulations, 1995 (SI No 27 of 1995). I have already discussed this matter here, here, and here. Those posts discuss the ongoing campaign by the National Consumer Agency against airlines which refuse to refund such taxes and charges, or which impose disproportionately high administration fees when non-travelling passengers seek to recover them. In the Irish Times recently, Ciarán Hancock reported on the next stage of that campaign:

Airlines retain €28m in taxes and charges on unfilled flight seats

The National Consumer Agency (NCA) is seeking to clip the wings of Irish airlines who pocket taxes and airport charges paid by passengers who do not travel on flights they have booked.

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Turner, Garrow, Zong; Contract law and the slave trade, redux

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| Cinema, television and theatre, Contract, The Zong

Slave Ship by Turner, via WikipediaI love the paintings of WIlliam Turner (1775–1851). Every January, the Vaughan bequest of Turner watercolours goes on display in the National Gallery of Ireland, and every January I spend a happy Saturday afternoon in their company. One of Turner’s most arresting paintings is The Slave Ship (Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on) (1840) which is now on display in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (thumbnail, left; click through for better image). It is inspired in part by the story of the slaveship The Zong (replica image | image | story | wikipedia). In 1781, the shipowners claimed under an insurance contract for the value of lost cargo, which consisted of 133 slaves thrown overboard because the ship was running out of water (it is voyage 84106 on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database). The captain claimed he acted out of necessity; and in the infamous case of Gregson v Gilbert (1783) 3 Doug 232, 99 ER 629, [1783] EngR 85 (22 May 1783) (pdf | National Archives), the claim succeeded at first instance, but failed on appeal.

Although this action was for breach of contract, it is the inspiration for the main action in last night’s episode of Garrow’s Law (BBC | imdb | wikipedia), a BBC television series inspired by the life and times of 18th century barrister William Garrow.…

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Harmonising Private Law

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| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, Contract

Stefan Vogenauer, via Oxford University websiteProfessor Stefan Vogenauer (University of Oxford) (pictured left) will give the winter lecture for the Irish Society of Comparative Law (ISCL) at 5:00pm on Thursday, 11 November 2010, in the Swift Lecture Theatre, Room 2041A Arts Block, Trinity College Dublin (map here). His title is:

The Theory and Practice of Using Comparative Law in the Harmonisation of Private Law: the Case of Release of Contractual Rights.

Professor Vogenauer is Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Brasenose College Oxford, and Director of the Oxford Institute of European and Comparative Law (IECL). His research interests lie mainly in the areas of comparative law, private law, international uniform law, European legal history and legal method. For his comparative and historical analysis of the interpretation of statutes in English, French, German and EU law, Die Auslegung von Gesetzen in England und auf dem Kontinent (Verlag Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2001, 2 vols), he was awarded the Max Weber Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society in 2002, as well as the 2008 Prize of the German Legal History Conference. More recently, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) awarded him approximately £350,000 to for a research project on ‘The Common Frame of Reference on European Contract Law in the Context of English and German Law’, which will explore the relationship between the recently published Common Frame of Reference and the contract laws of EU member states, as exemplified by German and English law.…

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Academic judgment and breach of contract in Ontario

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| Academic Freedom, Academic judgment, Andrew Croskery, Contract, Litigation, Universities

York University law, via their website.Omar Ha-Redeye has blogged on Slaw about an Ontario CA decision that is very relevant to the judicial review proceedings being taken by Andrew Croskery to challenge his degree results in Queen’s University Belfast (on which I have previously blogged: 1, 2, 3). The gravamen of those posts was that courts are slow to disturb substantive academic decisions, though beyond that sphere, they will of course give effect to claims in tort or for breach of contract. This distinction is at the heart of the case at issue in Omar’s blogpost: Jaffer v York University 2010 ONCA 654 (7 October 2010).

In this case, the plaintiff challenged a decision to exclude him at the end of his first year because he had not maintained a sufficient grade average, on the grounds that the university had failed to make proper accommodation for his Trisomy 21 (Down’s Syndrome) and that he had detrimentally relied on an alleged promise by a professor to defer his status while the dispute over disability was resolved. His claim failed at first instance, in part on the ground that, “[w]hile there may be contractual or tortious issues within the broader claim, if the pith and substance of the impugned conduct is academic in nature, the action cannot be continued in the courts” ([24] Pitt J).…

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Grievance poses academy ‘threat’

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| Academic Freedom, Andrew Croskery, Contract, Grading and Marking, Litigation, Universities

Queen's University Belfast, via wikipediaFurther to my two previous posts concerning student challenges to degree classification, there is a piece in this week’s Times Higher Education on the judicial review proceedings taken by Andrew Croskery challenging his degree results in Queen’s University Belfast. The piece contains some interesting reactions to the challenge [with added links]:

Grievance poses academy ‘threat’

… Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, warned that if the case were successful it could unleash a wave of similar challenges. “Of course it is important that universities do right by students. But if a student feels they are getting inadequate supervision, contact or anything else, they should deal with it up front and at the time. Otherwise the floodgates will be opened and it will be impossible to judge genuine cases from chancers,” he said.

Roger Brown, professor of higher education policy at Liverpool Hope University, described the case as a battle between academic authority and the marketisation of higher education. He said a ruling in favour of Mr Croskery would be “disastrous” because it would undermine universities’ academic authority. He noted that legal challenges of college grades were quite common in the US but said British courts had taken the view in similar previous cases that universities were in the best position to make academic judgements.

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Student challenges to degree classification, and examiners’ academic freedom – redux

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| Academic Freedom, Academic judgment, Andrew Croskery, Contract, Grading and Marking, Litigation, Universities

St Cross Building, Oxford, which houses the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, via their websiteNo sooner had I published yesterday’s post on student challenges to degree classification, and examiners’ academic freedom, than Afua Hirsh blogged that it’s not just law students who are learning how to sue. Against the background of the QUB case which I discussed in that post, she gave many other examples of cases in which students sued their universities because they had performed poorly in their degrees. (Indeed, yet another may be brewing here). In many of the cases Afua discusses, the students were successful in their claims. But probably the most important case she discusses concerned a Belgian DPhil student who claimed £3m from Oxford University for failing his thesis. George Van Mellaert complained about the examiners and about the university’s procedures. Unlike many of the other cases to which Afua referred, this case did not have a happy outcome for the student. As she said:

The court was less impressed with this claim, stating that “the claimant’s thesis is a matter of academic judgment with which it would be inappropriate for the court to interfere”.

Almost as soon as I had finished reading her article, I received an email from Martin George, with the full text of the decision in George van Mellaert v Oxford University [2006] EWHC 1565 (QB) (29 June 2006).…

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Student challenges to degree classification, and examiners’ academic freedom

| 9 Comments
| Academic Freedom, Academic judgment, Andrew Croskery, Contract, Grading and Marking, Litigation, Universities

NI Science ParkSome time ago, I blogged about the question of whether a low mark is a breach of contract. A little while ago, in a gallimaufry (omnibus) post, I briefly returned to this issue. The context was a US case, Keefe v New York Law School (17 November 2009) [update: 25 Misc 3d 1228(A) (2009) aff’d 71 AD3d 569 (2010)], but now it seems that the issue has arisen rather closer to home. Yesterday’s Irish Times tells the story:

Graduate takes university to court over degree results

A Queen’s University [Belfast] graduate yesterday launched a High Court challenge to his degree classification. In one of the first cases of its kind, Andrew Croskery has brought judicial review proceedings over his lower second-class honours classification.

Mr Croskery, from Co Down, claims if he had received better supervision he would have instead obtained an upper second-class in his electrical engineering degree.

Read more here.

There is similar coverage on the BBC and UTV; in the Belfast Telegraph, Cherwell, the Guardian (also here, on the Human Rights in Ireland blog), and the Mirror; and commentary on the Cantakerous, Gullibility, and Learning Architecture blogs.…

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