Entores — the English rule on instantaneous communication

This paper uses Entores for one narrow purpose: it is the English authority on instantaneous communication against which the Indian position is measured. It surfaces in the discussion of Bhagwandas Goverdhandas Kedia v. M/s Girdharilal Parshottamdas & Co., where Hidayatullah J., dissenting, used it to make a point about method rather than about outcome.

This course does not record the facts of the case, and an invented account would be worse than none. Study it through the use made of it in Kedia, and write about it only for the proposition set out below.

The proposition this course attributes to Entores is the English rule that where communication between the parties is instantaneous, the contract is complete only when the acceptance is received by the offeror — the rule that the postal exception does not extend to instantaneous communications.

The point the course draws from it is not the English court's reasoning but a difference in the materials available to the two courts. Hidayatullah J. observed that the English rule was worked out without a written provision to construe, whereas the Indian Contract Act supplies s. 4 — the communication of an acceptance is complete as against the proposer when it is "put in a course of transmission to him, so as to be out of the power of the acceptor" — and does not "provide separately for post, telegraph, telephone, or wireless". An Indian court, on that view, must begin from the enacted words rather than from a rule developed where there were none.

The method worth carrying away is that one: where a statute has spoken, an English decision is at best persuasive and at worst a distraction. In India the starting point on completion of acceptance is s. 4 of the Contract Act, and for electronic records s. 13 of the Information Technology Act, 2000.

Use Entores only in a comparative sentence when writing about Kedia — to show why the Indian rule cannot simply be recited as English law, and why the dissent took the view it did. Name it, state the proposition, and stop.

What it does not do: it is not Indian law, it does not govern the completion of a contract in India, and it decides nothing about electronic records. Do not give it a citation, a year or a bench: this course records none, and in a paper where fabricated authorities circulate freely, an invented citation costs more than the omission. If the question is about when an electronic contract is complete, the answer runs through s. 4 of the Contract Act, Kedia and s. 13 of the Information Technology Act — Entores is a footnote to that answer, never its spine.