Philosophical Foundations of Contractual Duress

This project comprises an academic inquiry into the conceptual and normative foundations of the duress doctrine in English contract law. In it I ask what, if anything, justifies the pervasive intuition that coercive threats vitiate otherwise valid agreements: what makes pressure illegitimate and what is so objectionable about being exposed to it? The thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach to this question, combining legal doctrinal analysis with work in moral and political philosophy to ascertain what grounds the coercion-invalidation principle, how that conclusion fits into the broader structure of contract law, and how it can explain the relevant law. I argue that the legal rules on duress are grounded by the moral concept of wrongful coercion, in which A exercises some form of power over B in what I term a disrespectful manner, and wrongs her by so doing. I further demonstrate how transposing this concept to the legal contractual context generates a distinct, contractualised form of wrongful coercion, the limits of which are partly informed by norms of contracting. Thus on my account, the doctrine of duress represents a rule by which English contract law posits its own conceptualisation of ‘respectful’ behaviour for contracting parties. In the final chapters, I use this theoretical framework to generate a model through which to understand the doctrine, and, through a nuanced reading of the relevant jurisprudence, demonstrate how my model neatly explains the law by characterising duress cases which other candidate theories fail to capture.