A Summary of Bannerman v White (1861)

Case name & citation: Bannerman v White (1861) 10 CBNS 844; 142 ER 685

Court: Court of Common Pleas, England and Wales
Date of judgment: 12 June 1861
Area of law: Incorporation of terms; importance of statement

Table of Contents

The Situation

A buyer wanted to purchase hops for making beer.

Before finalizing the deal, the buyer asked the seller if the hops had been treated with sulphur. The buyer made it clear that if the hops had been treated with sulphur, he wasn’t interested in buying them, because he couldn’t use them for making beer.

His wordings were: “If they have been treated with sulphur, I am not interested in even knowing the price of them.”

The seller wrongly assured the buyer that the hops had not been treated with sulphur.

After buying the hops, the buyer discovered that some of them had indeed been treated with sulphur and decided to cancel the contract.

The Legal Issue that arose

The seller argued that the discussion about sulphur was just part of the preliminary negotiations and not part of the actual contract.

The question was whether the statement about sulphur was a term of the contract (meaning it was a key part of what the contract promised) or just a casual comment.

The Court’s Decision in Bannerman v White

The court decided that the statement about sulphur was a term of the contract.

This is because the buyer had clearly said that the use of sulphur was very important to him, and he would not have bought the hops if he knew they were treated with sulphur.

Since the seller breached this term by selling hops that had been treated with sulphur, the buyer was right to cancel the contract.

Key Point

If a statement is very important to one of the parties and that party makes it clear that the statement is crucial to their decision, then the statement can become a term of the contract.

If the term is breached, the affected party can treat it as a breach of contract and may be entitled to remedies like rejecting the contract.

Significance (Bannerman v White)

This case illustrates that a pre-contractual statement may become a term of the contract if it is shown to be significantly important to one party. It underscores the principle that the more critical a pre-contractual statement is to one party’s decision to enter into the contract, the more likely it is to be incorporated as a term, rather than merely a representation. If a statement is treated as a term, its breach allows for remedies available for breach of contract, rather than those available for misrepresentation.

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