Unpaid Seller — Rights and Remedies Auction Sale

An exporter in Navi Mumbai ships a container of textiles to a buyer abroad on credit. Halfway across the sea, news arrives that the buyer is bankrupt. Can the exporter get the goods back before they reach the buyer’s warehouse? Change the facts: the goods are still in the exporter’s own godown and the buyer has not paid. Can he simply refuse to hand them over? And at a charity auction of paintings, a bidder says “twenty thousand” and then changes his mind before the hammer falls. May he? This topic covers both the seller’s protection against non-payment and the special rules for sale by auction.

In two minutes

An unpaid seller has rights against the goods themselves (lien, stoppage in transit, resale) and rights against the buyer personally (suit for price or damages), and a sale by auction is governed by s.64, under which the sale is complete only when the auctioneer announces it by the fall of the hammer.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Contract – II on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.