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Manifestly, provisions of this sort have nothing to do with

the contracts of employment of individual officers. Furthermore, such

"regulations" are clearly intended to be applied equally to permanent and pensionable officers (who do not have memoranda of conditions of

service) and "contract" officers. If "regulations" such as these were

binding in contract, officers would acquire the legal right only to

be dealt with in terms of the regulations.

A further legal difficulty confronts those seeking to incorporate

the Colonial and Government Regulations into the contract of employment.

Generally speaking, the officer is not shown these regulations when the

offer is made and before it is accepted. The general rule is that when

a party does not actually put his signature to a document purported by the other party to contain terms of the contract, such terms will only be binding if reasonably sufficient steps have been taken to bring them

6 to the notice of the accepting party. It has been argued with some force

that the problem of insufficiency of notice is exacerbated in the case of

the Hong Kong Government. Not only, the argument goes, is the officer not shown the Regulations before he accepts employment, he would not be allowed to see them if he sought to, because they are "classified" by

C.S.R. 16, i.e. they are not to be made known to persons outside the

Government service. I do not find this second limb of the argument

especially strong because it is not likely that a potential employee who asked to see them would be denied the opportunity. Some officers are sent extracts of various G.R.'s when they are offered employment. A

serious doubt nevertheless subsists where a party agrees to be subject to

identifiable conditions which he has not seen. To what extent, if at

all, can a party contract "blind"? There are cases where parties have been bound e.g. by conditions appearing in a railway timetable, notice of which fact has been given on the back of the passenger's ticket. On the other hand, as Lord Devlin observed in McCutcheon v. David MacBrame Ltd. (supra. at p. 437) "you cannot have a contract subject to uncommunicated.

conditions the terms of which are known only to one side". Furthermore,

6.

See Goodstadt and Li 4 HKLJ (1974) p.22