Summer Term, 2014
Lecturer and Module Co-ordinator: John Halladay
Texts: Poole, Textbook on Contract Law
McKendrick, Contract Law
Casebook: Both Poole and McKendrick have casebooks which are very good. There are also many others on the market.
Statute book: There are not many statutes in the course but there are some and this will be useful for the exam. Any Contract or Commercial Law statute book should do.
A. WHY CONTRACT?
A legal institution to facilitate confident planning, shaped by prevailing political and economic philosophy. Businesses need to plan their affairs relying on the fact that contracts can be enforced in order to maintain the web of inter-dependent relationships.
Contracts are a way of enforcing agreements. One needs to anticipate the future as in thinking what can go right and what can go wrong, cause it allows one to project into the future e.g wanting things to work out a certain way in the future, and so a contract can be used to have people do things into the future or protect you from things that can go wrong in the future. It’s not just a reactive thing but it gives one the possibility of planning into the future.
It has a wealth maximisation function also since it is an exchange of goods and services to someone who values them the most such as one values the object In a store more than the money in ones pocket and the store values the money in ones pocket than the object they have in their store (objective and subjective approach e.g when determining the value of something). This as such creates wealth in society by moving goods and services to those who value it more. One flaw however is transaction cost such as advertisement cost etc, so contracts do not come for free it takes time and effort. The biggest transaction cost in contract is legal cost.
Efficiency – certainty (structure) – needed for a proper contract.
A contract is a legally enforceable