Hartog v Colin & Shields [1939] 2 All ER 566
Facts
Sellers negotiated the supply of hare skins. Trade practice and the previous discussions used a price per skin. Their written offer mistakenly stated the price per pound, which would produce a substantially lower total. The buyer purported to accept that figure. When the sellers discovered the error, they refused delivery, and he sued for contractual damages. The court considered whether the buyer could genuinely have understood the quoted unit as the intended commercial offer, given the negotiations and customary way of pricing the goods.
Legal Issue
Could the buyer enforce the written price where the negotiations and trade practice showed that he must have recognised the unit-of-price mistake?
Held
The court rejected the buyer's claim. The seller had mistakenly quoted a price per pound rather than per skin, producing a price substantially below the negotiated and customary basis. The buyer must have realised that the written offer did not reflect the seller's intended terms.
He could not obtain a contract by purporting to accept the obvious error. The objective approach to agreement does not protect a recipient who knows the offer has been misstated in that way. The result is distinct from an undisclosed error which the recipient reasonably treats as intended. It also concerns a mistake about a contractual term, not merely an incorrect assumption about the goods' quality or the seller's motives.
⭐ Legal Principle
A recipient cannot insist on an apparent bargain where they know that a material offer term has been misstated. The objective formation analysis takes relevant knowledge and context into account. Hartog does not provide a general right to escape any bad bargain or every uncommunicated pricing error.
Significance
Hartog is a useful contrast with Centrovincial. Both involve mistaken figures, but the recipient's knowledge and the commercial context differ. Trade practice and prior negotiations made the unit-of-price error apparent in Hartog. The case should not be turned into a broad fairness jurisdiction: a low price is not automatically a mistake. Identify evidence that the recipient understood the term to be erroneous before concluding that its purported acceptance could not form a contract.
Common exam questions about this case
Why did the unit used for the price matter?
Quoting per pound instead of per skin substantially reduced the apparent total and departed from the negotiations and trade practice. Those circumstances made the mistake apparent to the buyer. The court was not simply correcting a price it regarded as unfair; it addressed knowing reliance on a misstated term.
How is an undisclosed mistake different?
Where the recipient reasonably understands the offer as intended and has no reason to recognise an error, the objective agreement may remain binding. Centrovincial illustrates that different situation. Hartog depended on the buyer's appreciation of the mistake, not the seller's private intention alone.
Is this the same as common mistake about quality?
No. Hartog concerns one party's known error in expressing a contractual term. Common mistake concerns a shared assumption underlying an apparently agreed bargain. The tests and consequences must be analysed separately; describing both disputes simply as mistake risks applying the wrong formation or avoidance rule.