Adjudicating undue pressure in nuptial agreements

Thompson, Sharon ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2569-856X 2025. Adjudicating undue pressure in nuptial agreements. Financial Remedies Journal 3 , pp. 252-254.

PDF - Accepted Post-Print Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (196kB)

Abstract

When the court considers the effect of a nuptial agreement, it must navigate a central tension: acknowledging that pressure may have undermined one party’s decision to sign, while also recognising the legitimate reasons the other party sought the agreement. Thus, a nuptial agreement often represents a clash of two interests – particularly where there is a wealth gap between the parties – whereby one person wants the agreement and the other does not. The irony of this tension is that very few nuptial agreements have been varied or set aside because one of the parties was under pressure to sign. According to the Supreme Court in Radmacher v Granatino [2010] UKSC 42, ‘unworthy conduct’ could (following Edgar v Edgar [1980] 1 WLR 1410) include ‘exploitation of a dominant position to secure an unfair advantage’. This suggests that power imbalance is not enough in itself, but that the party holding the power in the relationship must also have unfairly exploited that power. This exploitation of power can be difficult to prove, and persuading the court that it is sufficiently serious to justify setting aside the nuptial agreement is harder still. In KA v MA [2018] EWHC 499 (Fam), the wife rejected professional advice and signed a prenup, which the husband told her she must sign to marry him. In Roberts J’s view, the wife was ‘psychologically torn’ between proceeding with the wedding and signing an agreement ‘which might well, at some point in the future, operate to her significant financial detriment’. The wife was found to have been ‘motivated principally by what she perceived to be in their son’s best interests’ and did not make much attempt to ask for more under the agreement out of fear that the wedding would not go ahead. But this pressure was not enough to lead the court to a conclusion that the wife’s free will was overborne, and adjustments were instead made to the agreement according to her needs. More recently, in Helliwell v Entwistle [2025] EWCA Civ 1055, the nuptial agreement in question was set aside on the basis of non-disclosure, but the Court of Appeal stated that, despite being ‘highly undesirable’, the ‘fact that the agreement was not produced for the husband to sign until the morning of the wedding’ would not have been sufficient to vitiate the agreement. These are just two examples of the court’s emphasis on need and other more easily evidenced procedural factors over the impact of pressure on the agreement – a pattern that also emerges in my empirical research with barristers and FDR judges. And so, with few nuptial agreements set aside because of undue pressure, PN v SA [2025] EWFC 141 is notable because the separation agreement (which followed an earlier post-nuptial agreement that was adhered to) in this case was set aside. This article focusses upon the court’s reasons for doing so, before reflecting more broadly on how undue pressure might be adjudicated in nuptial agreement cases in future.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Law
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General) K Law > KD England and Wales
Additional Information:	RRS applied 13/01/2025 AB
Publisher:	Class Legal
ISSN:	2754-5709
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	13 January 2026
Date of Acceptance:	2 October 2025
Last Modified:	14 Jan 2026 12:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/183800

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item