ABSTRACT
In addition to express statutory provisions, terms may be implied where they are necessary consequences of distinct types of legal relationships. As Lord Denning MR put it in Shell (UK) Ltd v Lostock Garage Ltd (see fn 50, below) ‘relationships of common occurrence’. Thus, there are terms which necessarily arise out of the relationship between the supplier and the consumer of goods and services, an employer and an employee, a landlord and a tenant, and a builder and the person who commissions the building. In cases of this kind, the court examines earlier authorities and the general policy of the law to decide what obligations the law imposes. The main difficulty in this regard is whether the contract entered into is one which is of a defined type. For example, the contract may be one between banker and customer but, at the same time, is so carefully drawn up on a one-off basis that it falls outside the general class.48 But there appears to be an alternative approach to the problem in that new fact situations may be promoted to the status of a defined type of contract. Thus, a contract for the sale and purchase of travellers’ cheques has been described as self-evidently such a contract,49 although the issue of whether a solus agreement was of a defined class seemed to cause much greater difficulty some 13 years earlier.50
