Potters Mill Investments 14 (Pty) Ltd v Abe Swersky & Associates (7218/2006) [2016] ZAWCHC 5 (1 February 2016) per Koen AJ.
[11] Where a plaintiff alleges in a pleading that a particular law governs the case, whereas that law may not, an admission by a defendant that the law referred to governs the case does not make it so. What the law is has always been a matter for the Court to determine, and it is well established that mistakes about the law which the parties make are not binding on a Court. Thus, in Paddock Motors (Pty) Ltd v Igesund 1976 (3) SA 16 (AD) the Court observed that it would be “an intolerable position if a Court were to be precluded from giving the right decision on accepted facts, merely because a party failed to raise a legal point, as a result of an error of law on his part” (at 23 F–G).
[12] Admissions of fact are not, in my view, quite the same as admissions of law. They are, as was described in Van Der Bijl and Others v Louw and Another 1974 (2) SA 493 (CPD) “an unequivocal agreement by one party with a statement of fact made by the others, and its effect is to eliminate the production of evidence by the latter to prove that fact” (at 503 D–E).