Cases - Daniel v Ferguson
Record details
- Name
- Daniel v Ferguson
- Date
- (1891)
- Citation
- 2 Ch. 27
- Legislation
- Keywords
- Rights of light
- Summary
-
The plaintiff owned a long lease on a property that adjoined land owned by the defendant. After inspecting plans showing proposed building works on the defendant's land, the plaintiff feared that a proposed wall would interfere with his rights of light. He therefore issued a writ and made an application for an interim injunction preventing the development from going ahead. The defendant received notice on the Saturday that an injunction was going to be applied for the following Friday. He immediately set a large number of men to work, worked all night and nearly all Sunday so that by Monday evening, the wall was already up to 39 ft. At the hearing of the injunction application, the judge ordered the defendant to stop building and to remove the wall he had built from his land. The defendant appealed.
The Court of Appeal considered whether the judge had been entitled to order an interim mandatory injunction that would result in the defendant taking down an otherwise perfectly sound wall until the matter was finally disposed of at trial. It held that the judge was justified in making his order. It found that to order otherwise would encourage people to speed up and complete their building works in the hope that, once they were up, the court would be reluctant to order them to be pulled down.