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Greetings to all,

I have finally got the text of Westdeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale v Islington L.B.C. up on the list.

For those not familiar with it, it is a decision of the House of Lords of 22 May 1996. The plaintiff bank and the defendant local council entered into an interest rate swap transaction later declared void as ultra vires the defendant. The plaintiff sought to recover money paid by it under the swap, with compound interest. In order to bolster its claim to compound interest, the plaintiff argued that the money was held by the defendant as a fiduciary under a resulting trust. The House, by a 3-2 majority, allowed only simple interest, rejecting the trust argument and overruling Sinclair v Brougham [1914] AC 398 in the process.

You can get the case by sending an email to

majordomo@majordomo.srv.ualberta.ca

(nb not restitution@majordomo.srv.ualberta.ca); leave the subject blank and put in the body of the message

get restitution restfiles/wd.txt

The case will come as an email. If your mailer is like mine (Eudora Light) the case will probably get broken into a number of messages (perhaps nine) because it is rather long.

This method of distribution allows only text without any fancy formatting. Thus eg quotations from other cases are not indented (although they are clearly marked by quotation marks) and the names of cases are not italicized etc. For ease of quotation from the judgment, however, I have (1) inserted marks to show the transcript page numbers; thus [23] shows the start of p 23 in the official transcript; (2) marked any underlining in the original speeches _like this_. Note that the case has now been reported in the Times (30 May) which is accessible on the Web (http://www.the-times.co.uk/), but of course this only gives a summary of the main points.

I have also made available another case, F. C. Jones & Sons (Trustees in Bankruptcy) v. Jones, a recent judgment of the English Court of Appeal (I do not have the exact date but think it was in March). One of the bankrupt partners wrote a cheque drawn on a partnership account in favour of his wife, after the act of bankruptcy and therefore after all of the partnership property had vested in the trustee in bankruptcy. The wife used the money to speculate successfully in futures. The court (through Millett LJ) held that the trustee in bankruptcy could take the traceable proceeds (in the form of a bank account in the wife's name), including the profits, on the strength of a purely common law claim. The case would be unremarkable except for its being decided without regard to any trust theory or any use of equity; Millett LJ said that the trustee could have sued the bank at common law on the account, even though the account was in the wife's name.

To get this case, email as above except put

get restitution restfiles/jones.txt

You can order both cases with one email, just be sure each "get" command is on a separate line in your message.

Lionel Smith