Royal Bank of Scotland v Purvis 1990 SLT 262
Citation: Royal Bank of Scotland v Purvis 1990 SLT 262
Rule of thumb: In very long contracts, are you bound by the terms of them? Yes, ignorance is no excuse.
Judgment:
The basic facts of this case were that a woman was uneducated and agreed to sign a guarantee for her house for her husband’s business – she made an error as to the nature of the contract. The Court held that an error as to the nature or subject matter of the contract would be sufficient to render the contract void, but there had to be a degree of fault - where there is an essential error made by one of the parties which is uninduced by the other party and occurs through their own fault then the contract is not deemed to be void. The contract cannot be reduced because the other party is uninformed about the subject. There has to be some degree of blame which can be pointed to either in the spoken negotiations or the written communications otherwise error cannot be relied upon. This is what is called an uninduced unilateral error which is not sufficient to render the contract void, ‘The law does not permit her to say that because she did not take the trouble to read the document or to ask for an explanation or to postpone signing it until she got one, she can now say the obligations she thought she was undertaking were different from the one’s the document imposed on her’, Lord McCluskey
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