Bad Bargains

It is often said that the courts will not save parties from bad bargains: as Lord Nottingham observed, even ‘the Chancery mends no man's bargain’. This article considers what is meant by ‘bad bargain’, and argues that courts should be reluctant to develop the law in a way which would allow sophisticated commercial actors to escape bad bargains. This analysis is timely since in the current economic climate a number of long-term contracts have become especially disadvantageous to one party, and one consequence of Brexit is likely to be an increase in instances where one party tries to escape a bad bargain. Sympathy for the party which finds itself subject to a bad bargain has led to pressure on courts to find that an agreement is not binding; to expand the scope of the vitiating factors; and to liberalise the principles of interpretation and rectification, for example. It is suggested that courts should not readily bow to such pressure.