The house was asked whether a hypothetically rebuilt block of flats would have been subject to the Rent Restriction Acts.
Held: Lord Asquith said: ‘If you are bidden to treat an imaginary state of affairs as real, you must surely, unless prohibited from doing so, also imagine as real the consequences and incidents which, if the putative state of affairs had in fact existed, must inevitably have flowed from or accompanied it. One of these in this case is emancipation from the 1939 level of rents. The statute says that you must imagine a certain state of affairs; it does not say that having done so, you must cause or permit your imagination to boggle when it comes to the inevitable corollaries of that state of affairs.’
Judges:
Lord Asquith of Bishopstone
Citations:
[1952] AC 109
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Rose v Lynx Express Ltd. and Bridgepoint Capital (Nominees) Ltd CA 7-Apr-2004
In an request for pre-action discovery it was plainly wrong for the court to seek to decide in advance any element of the virtues of the case.
Held: The appeal should be allowed. The case was arguable and should be allowed to proceed.
Cited – Star Energy Weald Basin Ltd and Another v Bocardo Sa SC 28-Jul-2010
The defendant had obtained a licence to extract oil from its land. In order to do so it had to drill out and deep under the Bocardo’s land. No damage at all was caused to B’s land at or near the surface. B claimed in trespass for damages. It now . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Litigation Practice
Updated: 29 April 2022; Ref: scu.196552