A CRITICAL EVALUATION OF THE APPROPRIATENESS OF DURESS AND UNDUE INFLUENCE AS LEGAL SAFEGUARDS AGAINST UNCONSCIONABLE CONTRACTS

Abstract

In the Law of Contract, duress and undue influence are equitable concepts that permit an innocent party to withdraw from a subsisting contractual relationship of influence on grounds that the innocent or aggrieved party was induced by reprehensible pressure on the part of the other party, to accede to such contractual relationship.Where the plea of duress or undue influence is made, what the innocent party is saying is that as a result of some unconscionable conduct of the other party to the contract, the agreement that gave rise to the contract could not be said to have proceeded from the voluntary choice of the aggrieved party and as such should be annulled. Thus, the major issue where duress or undue influence is relied on to seek to invalidate a contract is whether the party complaining has acted freely. However, duress must be distinguished from undue influence in that the former is usually pleaded as a causative factor to undue influence whereas the latter is relied upon to establish that as a result of duress or other causes, the aggrieved person was deprived of the requisite mental capacity to legitimately and freely make a choice.1 It is therefore not in doubt that presence of such pressure should be a good-enough reason to overturn an otherwise good agreement. It is however important to scrutinize the belief(s) that inspire resolutions to permit a repudiation of contract on the basis of these concepts with a view to delimiting the exact range of each of them. This paper is an attempt to examine whether duress and undue influence as vitiating factors constitute sufficient legal safeguards against unconscionable contractual transactions.