Say the ratio out loud before you open Reasoning — recalling it unprompted is exactly what the exam pays for.
Why it matters
It answers the hard case in the law of submission: the defendant who appears in the foreign court only to say that it has no jurisdiction. Without this case, a defendant would have to choose between letting judgment go by default and losing the very point he wanted to take.
Facts
This course cites the case for the principle and does not set out its facts. The situation it addresses is an appearance entered to protest the foreign court's jurisdiction.
Held
An appearance made to protest jurisdiction is not submission. Lord Denning's reasoning is that it cannot fairly be said that a man has voluntarily submitted to the jurisdiction of a court when he has all the time been vigorously protesting that it has no jurisdiction. The proposition to carry is that to protest is not necessarily to submit.
Reasoning
Step one — submission must be voluntary. The ground of competence is the party's own choice to accept the court. Protest is the opposite of that choice.
Step two — reject the older test. The earlier cases distinguished according to whether property had already been seized, treating an appearance to recover seized property as submission. The modern position rejects that distinction: what matters is what the party is asking the court to do, not what pressure brought him there.
Step three — the practical consequence. A defendant may appear, take the jurisdictional objection, and still resist recognition later. Where the objection is not taken, it is gone.
Exam use
It opens: Does an appearance to contest jurisdiction amount to submission? — and it is the first case to cite.
Set it against S.A. Consortium v. Sun and Sand, which gives the three positive forms of submission: suing as plaintiff, appearing and pleading on the merits, and appealing. The line between the two cases is the line between contesting the court's right to decide and asking it to decide.
Give the Indian illustration of the cost of not protesting. In British India Steam Navigation Co. v. Shanmugha Vilas Cashew Industries the Supreme Court quoted the rule that a mere protest, even coupled with an application for a stay pending foreign proceedings, is not submission — and then held the appellant had submitted, because no jurisdictional ground was taken in the memorandum of appeal below or in the special leave petition.
Draw the practitioner's moral, which is what a problem question is testing: take the objection in the first document you file, and take it expressly.
It does not decide what happens where a party protests, loses, and then defends on the merits; the course does not carry the question further.