Pragmatism and Theory in English Law - College of Social Sciences ...

The Strengths of the Pragmatic Tradition 59
panies whose very structure and nature invites comment
and suspicion:
"We often see in this court," he said, "a corporation
which is registered in a country where the company
law is so loose that nothing is known about it—where it
does no work and has no officers and no assets.
Nothing can be found out about the membership, or its
control, or its assets, or the charges on them. Judgment
cannot be enforced against it. There is no reciprocal
enforcement of judgments. It is nothing more than a
name grasped from the air, as elusive as the Cheshire
cat." 20
Of course practical problems arose, and had to be carefully
dealt with. The procedure by way of ex parte injunction
is plainly open to abuse, and the courts have therefore
insisted that the plaintiff is under a duty to make full disclosure
of all relevant facts before the injunction will be
granted. 21 Then there were difficulties concerning the rights
of third parties, such as banks, who might find themselves
compelled to dishonour their clients' cheques at a moment's
notice. Furthermore, banks might incur substantial costs in
combing through their books to find out if a defendant had
an account with them. Clearly third parties need protection
in these and other ways against the effects of a Mareva
injunction, and in a series of cases the courts have worked
out a number of detailed rules to achieve this result without
substantially weakening the utility of the injunctions themselves.
22 Since then, the Mareva injunction has gone from
20 Third Chandris Shipping v. Unimarine, supra, at p 669.
21 See, e.g. The Assios [1979] 1 Lloyd's Rep. 331.
22 See Z. Ltd. v. A.-Z. [1982] Q.B. 558; Iraqi Ministry of Defence v. Arcepey
[1980] 1 AUE.R. 480.