LAW

Can You Threaten Your Way into a Contract? 🥊

If I threaten to hurt someone if they don’t agree to make a contract with me, would the subsequent contract be valid? This is where “duress” comes into play. If a person was threatened or pressured to the point where they were compelled to enter the contract with no practical alternative, the contract will be voidable. It is important to note that “voidable” and “void” mean very different things in law. A void contract is completely nullified as if it never existed. A voidable contract is still enforceable but gives one party the right to rescind or affirm it. So, if A sold their car to B under duress and B sold it to C in good faith before A could rescind the contract, A cannot recover it from C since the contract was valid at that point. However, if the contract is void, A could recover it from C; since the contract was unenforceable, B wouldn’t have had the title to sell it to C.

💡 Things to consider

• What Constitutes Duress? The House of Lords in The Universe Sentinel [1983] 1 AC 614 stated that duress occurs where there’s an illegitimate pressure that induces the party to enter the contract. Under Barton v Armstrong [1976] AC 104, actual or threatened violence to a person in a close relationship with the claimant, or the claimant themselves, will amount to illegitimate pressure. This pressure must have been a reason for entering into the contract but doesn’t need to have been the sole or main reason. Alternatively, if the threats were against property rather than a person, then the threats must be a significant cause for their entry into the contract (Dimskal Shipping Co SA v International Worker’s Federation, The Evia Luck [1992] 2 AC 152).

  

  But really … lots of pressure.

• Economic Duress: This form of duress requires threats to a person’s finances, e.g. one party threatens to breach an existing contract unless it’s renegotiated. As noted in The Universe Sentinel, alongside the other requirements mentioned above, the claimant must have no practicable alternative. This is a lot narrower than other forms of duress since economic pressure can be both a useful and necessary negotiation tool, so it’s only considered economic duress where it’s completely unconscionable. For instance, If A agrees to sell B a rare car for £20, C then offers A £30 for it, and A threatens to take the higher offer unless B pays £50 instead, which B then does, this will likely constitute economic duress. However, as was the case in Williams v Roffey Bros & Nicholls [1991] 1 QB 1, if A paid B for refurbishments with a monetary penalty for lateness, B subcontracts to C, but C then faced monetary problems that made it impossible to finish on schedule and asked to renegotiate their contract, there wouldn’t be economic duress.

  

  Buy our car!

• Lawful Act Duress: What if the threat was to do something completely legal, e.g. I will tell the police you stole my cat, if you don’t buy me a new cat? This form of duress was most recently brought to the Supreme Court in Times Travel (UK) Ltd v Pakistan International Airlines Corporation [2021] UKSC 40, but none of the judges could really decide what actually constitutes lawful act duress. So, it is easiest to say that it’s very rare but the more unfair the demand from the person causing the duress, the more likely it is to be lawful act duress; what matters is whether the pressure can be justified, but the boundary is unclear.

  

  She’s MY cat.

🔎 Find out more

• Duress in English Law

• Duress in Contract Law

• More on Duress

• More on the Pakistan International Airline Corporation v Times Travel case

• Lawful Duress

🍒 The cherry on top

• 🎼 Math & Music: What do time signatures, pitch, and note lengths have in common? Fractions and ratios! This interactive lesson explains how music relies on mathematical concepts like fractions (for note values) and ratios (for pitch and string length). Great for anyone interested in Mathematics and Music (of course!)

• 🧬 The Last Humans Standing: Why did only one branch of the human family tree survive? This longread explores the story of archaic Homo sapiens — our ancient cousins who made necklaces, buried their dead, and roamed from Africa to Europe — only to vanish. Were we smarter, more social, just luckier… or simply more dangerous? A fascinating deep dive into Biology or Anthropology.

• 🧠 Lost in Translation: Does language shape the way we think? In this article, Lera Boroditsky explores how the languages we speak affect our perception of space, time, blame, memory, and more. From Aboriginal navigational feats to how English and Japanese speakers describe accidents, this piece is a must-read for anyone curious about Linguistics, Psychology, or Modern Languages.

👀 Keep your eyes peeled for…

• 28th May

  • Keble College Oxford Personal Statement Webinar

  • Murray Edwards Cambridge Archaeology Webinar

  • Royal Veterinary College Nursing Taster Session

• 29th May

  • Homerton College Cambridge Engineering Subject Taster Session

  • Royal Veterinary College Biosciences Taster Session

• 2nd June

  • Murray Edwards College Cambridge Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic Taster Session

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