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Dear all,

As regards the disagreement as to whether Wrotham Park Estate and Att-Gen v Blake are based on the same principle and represent a sliding scale of restititution/disgorgement for wrongs, readers may be interested in Lord Nicholls' recent extra-judicial views. At p 129 of Commercial Remedies (ed Burrows and Peel, 2003) which has just been published by Oxford University Press there appears the following (which reports the colloquium discussion of these issues): "Once one had crossed the threshold for being able to recover an account of profits for breach of contract, rather than compensatory damages or specific relief, Lord Nicholls thought that the measure of recovery could extend from expense saved through to stripping a proportion of the profits made through to stripping all of the profits made from the breach. The Wrotham Park Estate case (where 5 per cent of the profits had been stripped) was therefore based on the same principle as A-G v Blake (where all the profits had been stripped)."

I presume Lord Nicholls is the "empire-builder" to whom Steve Hedley is referring!

Andrew Burrows