circumstances, been made.” Lord Wright said (at 157), "The Court of Appeal held that, in the absence of any dishonest intention, or negligence, or breach of a specific duty to acquire the shares for the appellant company, the respondents as directors were entitled to buy the shares themselves. Once, it was said, they came to a bona fide decision that the appellant company could not provide the money to take up the shares, their obligation to refrain from acquiring those shares for themselves came to an end. With the greatest respect, I feel bound to regard such a conclusion as dead in the teeth of the wise and salutary rule so stringently enforced in the authorities. It is suggested that it would have been mere quixotic folly for the four respondents to let such an occasion pass when the appellant company could not avail itself of it; Lord King, L.C., faced that very position when he accepted that the person in the fiduciary position might be the only person in the world who could not avail himself of the opportunity." Reporting Curiously, even though it was a House of Lords decision, and is now regarded as one of the seminal cases on directors' duties, the decision was not reported in the official law reports until nearly 26 years after the decision was handed down. During the intervening period, it was only reported in the All England Law Reports. See also Guth v. Loft, the Delaware decision that deviated from the strict approach. Keech v Sandford, the rule of equity that has been the bedrock of fiduciary duties for 280 years. Ex parte James (1803) 32 ER 385 Notes External links Full text of decision from BAILII.org United Kingdom company case law House of Lords cases 1942 in British law 1942 in case law