Stein v Blake
English law judgment on bankruptcy
Stein v Blake [1995] UKHL 11 is a decision of the House of Lords in relation to the effect of automatic set-off in bankruptcy, and the power of a bankruptcy trustee to assign rights in action after the operation of such set-off under English law.
Issues
The only judgment was given by Lord Hoffman. He commenced his speech by summarising the issues as follows:
If A and B have mutual claims against each other and A becomes bankrupt, does A's claim against B continue to exist so that A's trustee can assign it to a third party? Or is the effect of section 323 of the Insolvency Act 1986 to extinguish the claims of A and B and to substitute a claim for the net balance owing after setting off the one against the other? And if the latter is the case, can the trustee assign the net balance (if any) before it has been ascertained by the taking of an account between himself and B? If yes, is that what the trustee in this case has done? These are the issues in this appeal.
Section 323 provides as follows:
(1) This section applies where before the commencement of the bankruptcy there have been mutual credits, mutual debts or other mutual dealings between the bankruptcy and any creditor of the bankrupt proving or claiming to prove for a bankruptcy debt.
(2) An account shall be taken of what is due from each party to the other in respect of the mutual dealings and the sums due from one party shall be set off against the sums due from the other.
(3) Sums due from the bankrupt to another party shall not be included in the account taken under subsection (2) if that other party had notice at the time they became due that a bankruptcy petition relating to the bankrupt was pending.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28404955. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1995 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stein v Blake” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.