The Medina

The Medina (1876) 2 PD 5 is an English contract law case, regarding the voidability of an agreement and a restitutionary award where the court finds that agreement is procured under extortionate circumstances.

The Medina
Red Sea coast near Port Ghalib, Egypt
CourtCourt of Appeal
Citation(s)(1876) 2 PD 5
Keywords
Exploitation, restitution

Facts

On a voyage from Singapore to Jeddah, The Medina hit Parkin Rock, part of the Hanish Islands in the Red Sea, and was wrecked. It had 550 pilgrims on board, who were taken by lifeboats to the rocks. The Timor answered a distress signal but refused to take the refugees to Jedda unless the master of The Medina paid £4000. The master agreed. But when they were safe, the master refused to pay. The captain of The Timor claimed the money in court.

Judgment

The Court of Appeal held that the £4000 was excessive, and so only £1800 would be awarded.

James LJ said it was ‘a very exorbitant sum for only a few days’ work… having regard to the particular circumstances, that pressure was exercised’.

Baggallay JA said it was ‘very large in comparison with the services rendered’ leading ‘to the conclusion that there may have been some unfair dealing’. The ‘captain of the Medina was bound to accept any terms which were pressed upon him by the Timor.

Brett JA said the standard rule is that,

where there is an agreement made by competent persons and there is no misrepresentation of facts, the agreement ought to be upheld, unless there is something very strong to shew that it is inequitable.

Promising to pay when there are 550 stranded people was "compulsion to the mind of any honest man".

gollark: Oh, actually there's option #3: just do single user mode and don't bother stopping editing of "OS" files.
gollark: Well, your current implementation lets them do stuff to OS files, so no.
gollark: I would recommend against #1, because weirdly enough people like being able to write, download and run programs.
gollark: In potatOS I do #2. Unfortunately the sandboxing implementation is about 500 lines of code, very version-specific because it runs half the BIOS for weird internal reasons, and has several known holes.
gollark: There are two ways around this:- make your "OS" unable to run arbitrary code and instead use a highly limited shell/GUI- sane sandboxing via providing no/a limited FS API to environments where you can run arbitrary code

See also
  • Boardman v Phipps
  • Alec Lobb Garages Ltd v Total Oil (GB) Ltd [1985] 1 WLR 173
  • Interfoto v Stiletto

Notes

    References
      This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.