This book is an analytical study of the current English law of traditional contracts of employment and of other personal employment contracts. Concentrating on the common law basis of individual employment law, it takes full account of relevant British and European Community legislation up to and including the Employment Act 2002. It argues for, and is constructed around a whole new category of employment contracts, which includes not only contracts of employment but also other "personal employment contracts", a concept which the author articulates and justifies.

This comprehensive book presents the English law of contract and tort in the context of a European law of obligations.Law of Obligations provides the reader with an overview of contract and tort as well as an introduction to the law of obligations in the civil (or continental) law tradition. The book is considered an extensive introduction to the western law of obligations, but with an emphasis on English law. Arising out of the analysis of the two legal traditions, Geoffrey Samuel raises questions about the appropriateness of importing the obligations category into the common law. He also highlights what has been termed the ?harmonisation debate?; should the law of obligations be harmonised at a European ? or even international level? The debate raises some fundamental issues not just about legal traditions and about the law of obligations itself, but also about comparative law theory and methodology.Designed with English law students and jurists in mind, this book will be an invaluable tool for researching contract, tort and the law of obligations. It is an original contribution not only to European private law but equally to comparative legal studies.

When commercial parties conclude a contract for the sale of goods, their main objective is to exchange the subject goods for the agreed purchase price. The civil law and common law traditions have adopted the notion that these contractual promises are binding and each has put in place specific instruments to protect the interests of both parties. However, while the civil law tradition protects the interest in actual performance of the assumed obligations with a right to enforced performance, the common law tradition perceives the availability of enforced performance as a rarity. This book explores the Dutch, Singapore and Chinese viewpoints on this issue by analysing the extent to which respective contract law principles balance out the interests of parties to a commercial sales contract in their principles surrounding the enforceability of performance obligations, and also how domestic solutions correlate to the approaches taken by global and regional sales and contract law instruments. The main focus of this undertaking is to address the fundamental differences in approach to safeguarding the buyer's performance interest in obtaining the very thing it bargained for, and the seller's interests in protection against unjustifiable consequences of awarding a claim for enforced performance.

The Joint Contracts Tribunal's (JCT) Standard Form of Building Contract, one of the most common standard contracts used in the UK to procure building work, is updated regularly to take account of changes in legislation and industry practice and relevant court decisions from litigation. The JCT 05 Standard Building Contract: Law and Administration is a second edition to the authors' earlier award-winning The JCT98 Building Contract: Law and Administration, and clarifies complex issues surrounding obligations and rights under the contract. This makes it an essential reference for construction professionals, employers, contractors, and lawyers new to construction seeking to update and consolidate their knowledge. The book also provides the knowledge and understanding of the contract, which are a fundamental part of the education of most students who go on to become managers and leaders in the construction industry. It thoroughly works through the provisions of the contract in simple language, using case law examples and relevant statute to demonstrate approaches to its interpretation.

Studies in the Contract Laws of Asia provides an authoritative account of the contract law regimes of selected Asian jurisdictions, including the major centres of commerce where limited critical commentaries have been published in the English language. Each volume in the series aims to offer an insider's perspective into specific areas of contract law - remedies, formation, parties, contents, vitiating factors, change of circumstances, illegality, and public policy - and explores how these diverse jurisdictions address common problems encountered in contractual disputes. A concluding chapter draws out the convergences and divergences, and other themes. All the Asian jurisdictions examined have inherited or adopted the common law or civil law models of European legal systems. Scholars of legal transplant will find a mine of information on how received law has developed after the initial adaptation and transplant process, including the mechanisms of and influences affecting these developments. At the same time, many points of convergence emerge. These provide good starting points for regional harmonization projects. Volume II of this series deals with contract formation and contracts for the benefit of third parties in the laws of China, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Myanmar. Typically, each jurisdiction is covered in two chapters; the first deals with contract formation, while the second deals with contracts for the benefit of third parties.

This collection of essays investigates the way in which modern private law apportions responsibility between multiple parties who are (or may be) responsible for the same legal event. It examines both doctrines and principles that share responsibility between plaintiffs and defendants, on the one hand, and between multiple defendants, on the other. The doctrines examined include those 'originating' doctrines which operate to create shared liabilities in the first place (such as vicarious and accessorial liability); and, more centrally, those doctrines that operate to distribute the liabilities and responsibilities so created. These include the doctrine of contributory (comparative) negligence, joint and several (solidary) liability, contribution, reimbursement, and 'proportionate' liability, as well as defences and principles of equitable 'allowance' that permit both losses and gains to be shared between parties to civil proceedings. The work also considers the principles which apportion liability between multiple defendants and insurers in cases in which the cause, or timing, of a particular loss is hard to determine. The contributions to this volume offer important perspectives on the law in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as a number of civilian jurisdictions. They explicate the main rules and trends and offer critical insights on the growth and distribution of shared responsibilities from a number of different perspectives - historical, comparative, empirical, doctrinal and philosophical.

This book looks at the negligence concept of tort law and studies the efficiency issue arising from the determination of negligence. It does so by scrutinizing actual court decisions from three common law jurisdictions - Britain, India and the United States of America. This volume fills a very significant gap, scrutinizing 52 landmark judgments from these three countries, by focussing on the negligent affliction of economic loss determined by common law courts and how these findings relate to the existing theoretical literature. By doing so, it examines the formalization of legal concepts in theory, primarily the question of negligence determination and liability, and their centrality in theories concerning tort law. This book will be very helpful for students, professors and practitioners of law, jurisprudence and legal theory. It will additionally be of use to researchers and academics interested in law and economics, procedure and legal history.

This textbook covers the contract law option of the UK's new A-level law syllabus, and provides at the same time an ideal introduction for anybody coming to the subject for the first time. The book covers all A-level syllabuses/specification requirements, and is written by the principal examiner in contract law for one of the major UK examination boards. It contains extensive case illustrations, and a range of examination related questions and activities. There is a special focus on key skills and on the new synoptic assessment syllabus requirements. This fully updated fourth edition builds upon the success of the first three editions, with new case law (especially on offer and acceptance, legal intent, terms, exemption clauses, and misrepresentation remedies) and coverage of new UK statute law (especially Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations).

The last two decades have witnessed the growth of new forms of entrepreneurial cooperation such as dynamic networks like virtual enterprises and enterprise pools. These business forms are often hybrid, having elements of both contract-based organizations and corporate forms, in particular partnership. This book examines the relative utility of contract and partnership law in fostering and maintaining these emerging business models, focusing on dynamic networks. The book analyzes how dynamic networks are organized and set up through, very often, collaborative contracts and how the behavior of their member firms is regulated. Good faith and fair dealing as a behavioral criterion in contractual and partnership relations, is an important theme of this work. The background and preconditions for the emergence and growth of such business forms is also investigated. The book contains case studies of such networks from different countries in particular Germany, Austria, Switzerland, England and Norway. It examines relevant legal rules in a number of jurisdictions such as England, Norway, Germany, Italy, France and the US. This detailed book will appeal to postgraduate students and academics in the fields of contract law, comparative law, partnership law and business/commercial law. Academics in other disciplines such as economics, sociology and business management will also find much to interest them in this study.

Consumers routinely enter into long-term contracts with providers of goods and services - from credit cards, mortgages, cell phones, insurance, TV, and internet services to household appliances, theatre and sports events, health clubs, magazine subscriptions, transportation, and more. Across these consumer markets certain design features of contracts are recurrent, and puzzling. Why do sellers design contracts to provide short-term benefits and impose long-term costs? Why are low introductory prices so common? Why are the contracts themselves so complex, with numerous fees and interest rates, tariffs and penalties?
Seduction by Contract explains how consumer contracts emerge from the interaction between market forces and consumer psychology. Consumers are short-sighted and optimistic, so sellers compete to offer short-term benefits, while imposing long-term costs. Consumers are imperfectly rational, so sellers hide the true costs of products and services in complex contracts. Consumers are seduced by contracts that increase perceived benefits, without actually providing more benefits, and decrease perceived costs, without actually reducing the costs that consumers ultimately bear.
Competition does not help this behavioural market failure. It may even exacerbate it. Sellers, operating in a competitive market, have no choice but to align contract design with the psychology of consumers. A high-road seller who offers what she knows to be the best contract will lose business to the low-road seller who offers what the consumer mistakenly believes to be the best contract. Put bluntly, competition forces sellers to exploit the biases and misperceptions of their customers.
Seduction by Contract argues that better legal policy can help consumers and enhance market efficiency. Disclosure mandates provide a promising avenue for regulatory intervention. Simple, aggregate disclosures can help consumers make better choices. Comprehensive disclosures can facilitate the work of intermediaries, enabling them to better advise consumers. Effective disclosure would expose the seductive nature of consumer contracts and, as a result, reduce sellers' incentives to write inefficient contracts.
Developing its explanation through a general framework and detailed case studies of three major consumer markets (credit cards, mortgages, and cell phones), Seduction by Contract is an accessible introduction to the law and economics of consumer contracts, and a powerful critique of current regulatory policy.

This second edition of Construction Law: From Beginner to Practitioner provides a thorough and comprehensive guide to construction law by blending together black letter law and socio-legal approaches. This mixed methodology makes an ideal introduction to the subject for those studying to enter the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) Industry in a professional capacity. Designed to equip the student with all they need to know about construction law, the topics covered include: * the fundamentals of law and the English legal system; * contract, business, tort and property law; * procurement, subcontracting and partnering; * claims, damages, losses and expenses; * dispute resolution including mediation, arbitration, litigation and adjudication. The books suitability for study is enhanced by its logical structure, chapter summaries and further reading lists whilst the role of law in achieving a more collaborative and less confrontational AEC industry is examined in detail. Fully updated throughout, this new edition includes coverage of post-Grenfell legislation; increased coverage of modern methods of construction and continuously evolving technologies such as BIM and digital twins; NEC4 and the latest JCT contract suite and the Construction Playbook. This book is useful not only for understanding the basics, but also as a reference that practitioners will use time and again.

The author of the well-received, A Guide to Federal Contracting, Dan Lindner provides in one volume, a succinct yet thorough treatment of Defense contracting requirements and regulations. The Department of Defense is the largest buyer of goods and services in the world, spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year, employing hundreds of thousands of people as civil servants or contractors. Yet no textbook is commercially available to discuss how defense contracting is done in a format that is written for the general public as well as the practitioner. This publication is intended fill this void - to demystify the volumes of regulations and policies, and provide in one volume a succinct yet thorough treatment of defense contracting requirements and regulations. Bringing together concepts of business law, politics, public and social policy, pricing, and procedures for contract placement and administration, the author draws on over 30 years of federal government experience to cover the vast spread of this important process which impacts our daily government operations.

The law of estoppel is a modern concept with a medieval label. It concerns the enforcement of obligations outside the law of contract and tort; we might call it the law of consistency, which obliges people to stand by things they have said. This is a book for lawyers, but will be of interest to other readers as a picture of how the law has tried to deal with its own shortcomings. The book will be of interest practitioners and scholars in other jurisdictions particularly Australia and New Zealand.

The book examines the ambiguous relationship between the European law on unfair commercial practices and contract law. In particular, the manuscript demonstrates that the Directive 2005/29/EC on unfair commercial practices (UCPD) has had a major impact on contract law, despite the declaration concerning the formal independence between the two branches of law established by Article 3(2) UCPD. The insights and conclusions identified in the book contribute to a better understanding of European private law and the general process of Europeanisation of private law in the European Union, and in particular of contract law.

"Efficient breach" is one of the most discussed topics in the literature of law and economics. What remedy incentivizes the parties of a contract to perform contracts if and only if it is efficient? This book provides a new perception based on an in-depth analysis of the impact the market structure, asymmetry of information, and deviations from the rational choice model have, comprehensively. The author compares the two predominant remedies for breach of contract which have been adopted by most jurisdictions and also found access to international conventions like the Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CiSG): Specific performance and expectation damages. The book illustrates the complexity such a comparison has under more realistic assumptions. The author shows that no simple answer is possible, but one needs to account for the circumstances. The comparison takes an economic approach to law applying game theory. The game-theoretic models are consistent throughout the entire book which makes it easy for the reader to understand what effects different assumptions about the market structure, the distribution of information, and deviations from the rational choice model have, and how they are intertwined.

The importance of insurance law to the effective underpinning of many branches of law is self-evident and yet, until relatively recently, it was not a widely taught subject in its own right. This work attempts to bring together the materials needed for the effective teaching of the subject: cases legislation, law reform proposals, articles, regulatory codes of conduct - a range of essential, but specialist, ingredients which students and libraries might find difficult and expensive to gather together.

With the growth of cross-border business, the rather important but complex and controversial topic of interpretation and gap filling in international commercial contracts receives more and more attention. International legal instruments such as CISG, UNIDROIT Principles, PECL and DCFR provide rules in order to interpret international commercial contracts in a uniform way. However, while these instruments may bring together already existing national concepts, they must of course be understood beyond the domestic concepts and approaches as such. This book is an autonomous comparison across the above-mentioned international legal instruments, with a focus on the rules on interpretation and gap filling that provides the necessary theoretical background and case law to understand the rules in practice. Interpretation and Gap Filling in International Commercial Contracts examines the uniform and harmonised set of rules in their own right; without comparison to national laws, but in their own unique setting of international commercial contracts. It is a practical user guide for both scholars and practitioners.

This book is written by three commercial lawyers. Their clients often ask them as much for help in getting out of a contract as in getting them into one in the first place. Built around two business case studies, the book highlights the various legal issues that a business must address when faced with a contract it wants to walk away from. In the first instance the business needs to discover whether it is as shackled by a contract as it thinks it is. In many cases a contract is not as binding as it might initially appear - Getting Out of a Contract explains the circumstances in which this applies. It then goes on to explore how to minimize the damage should the agreement be inescapable and helps the reader to understand what the consequences of any actions might be. Written in plain English, the authors manage to demystify complicated aspects of English law for the non-lawyer. This book will help managers to: c address how they make contracts; c avoid making wrong decisions because they fail to appreciate what contracts they actually have or how to get round them; c become more attuned to the legal ins and outs of contracts, enabling them to use lawyers more cost-effectively Company secretaries, finance directors and managers at all levels will find Getting Out of a Contract accessible and an invaluable business planning tool.

This book gives a detailed account of the current state of the law concerning good faith in contractual performance in Australia, through an empirical study on its reception and development across the various Australian jurisdictions. In Australia, good faith received wide attention after Priestly J introduced in his obiter comments in Renard Construction (ME) v Minister for Works (1992) 26 NSWLR 234.This book focuses on the attitude of the judges to good faith, the definition of good faith, and the possibility of legislating a good faith obligation in Australian contract law. This book also discusses the issues surrounding its development, its meaning, and acceptance at the international level.The empirical legal research adopted in this book will offer a significant contribution in understanding the concept of good faith in Australia from the empirical perspective.

This book represents a unique resource about Stewart Macaulay one of the common law world's leading scholars of the law of contract and of the law in action approach to the study of law. Since 1959, he has published over 50 articles in leading journals, a number of working papers, (with colleagues at the University of Wisconsin Law School) a pathbreaking casebook for the teaching of the law of contract, and (with other colleagues) equally pathbreaking collections of materials for the teaching of the law in action or law in context approach to the study of law. In this work Macaulay has established himself as one of the postwar world's leading scholars of the law of contract and of the sociology of law. His work is an absolute reference point in both disciplines, and it has attracted great attention elsewhere, most notably in economic sociology, where his concept of non-contractual economic relationships is regarded as an important theoretical innovation. Macaulay's work has become an object of commentary in its own right, and the proposed book is intended to assist further such commentary by making hitherto difficult to obtain works readily accessible. Most of Macaulay's work is now, when the leading journals are generally available in electronic form, readily accessible to students and researchers in universities. There are, however, a number of interesting and in most cases important works published in less accessible journals or works which were not published in an electronic form, which are difficult to obtain. This book will make them readily available, and in so doing will make it possible in future for scholars to have Macaulay's complete oeuvre readily to hand. Although Macaulay's work has provoked very considerable discussion, there previously have been no overall accounts of that work as opposed to critical engagements with aspects of it. In this book, two additional essays by leading commentators give accounts of Macaulay's work and provide an introduction to, exegesis of and general evaluation of Macaulay's work as a whole which is not to be found in the existing literature.

This book explores the theoretical basis of precontractual liability for the unilateral breaking-off of negotiations from a comparative perspective. It argues that, in the selected civil law jurisdictions (Germany, France and Chile), the true basis of this liability is the notion of 'reliance' and it distinguishes two dimensions of reliance: 'trust-based' and 'expectation-based'. For the selected civil law jurisdictions it can be observed that trust-based reliance merges with the general principle of good faith and that the expectation dimension emanates from the trust-dimension. Therefore, Reliance in the Breaking-Off of Contractual Negotiations argues that this innovative theoretical approach to the foundations of precontractual liability could have important practical consequences in jurisdictions that do not embrace a general principle of good faith, such as English law. If the analysis is shifted from good faith to the notion of reliance, English law could develop a less fragmented approach and encompass cases that are currently devoid of protection. How legal changes could be implemented without establishing a general principle of precontractual liability is explored in the final chapter of the book. In a constantly evolving world where international trade is ever-growing, precontractual liability, particularly for breaking off negotiations, is a topic of constant development by legal scholars and the judiciary and of increasing importance for practitioners, judges and academics, with significant consequences for negotiating contracts both at a national and at a transnational level.

This work sets out the characteristics and nature of retention of title clauses in the UK and 14 other European countries. ROTs stand at the junction of so many aspects of substantive law, including contract, sale of goods, trusts, personal property security and company charges. This work identifies these concepts as they apply in each jurisdiction considered. At present there is no work which sets out ROTs as a phenomenon on the commercial law of Europe and there is no point of easy reference for anyone working in the field in this regard. An obvious virtue of this work is that it makes the law accessible. Each essay in written by experts in the field within their own jurisdiction.

This book examines the contractual relationships of creative artists within a number of areas of the entertainment industry. Whilst it focuses specifically on football, cricket, boxing and music, developments within other parts of the entertainment business are observed. The book also charts the concessions (artistic, professional and personal) that are often made by such artists in an attempt to achieve success and the consequent legal problems that may arise from their working relationships. Embracing historical materials and current legal practices, Contract and Control in the Entertainment Industry will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of law, sociology and cultural studies. It will also appeal to anyone who is interested in seeing how many areas of the entertainment industry have placed very restrictive contractual controls on the raw materials of the industry - the creative artists.

This volume focuses on transparency as the guiding principle for insurance regulation and supervisory law. All chapters were written by experts in their respective fields, who address transparency in a wide range of European and non-European jurisdictions. Each chapter reviews the transparency principles applicable in the jurisdiction discussed. While the European jurisdictions reflect different facets of the principle as emerging from EU law on insurance, the principle has developed quite differently in other jurisdictions.

The late John Fleming, emeritus Professor of Law in the University of California at Berkeley, was the pre-eminent torts lawyer of the age; his Law of Torts has influenced generations of students and scholars, and remains a classic of legal literature. In this volume, distinguished academics and judges from around the world pay tribute to him in a collection of essays which range widely across tort law, legal theory, legal history and comparative law. Topics discussed include: tort and human rights; the duty of care in negligence; codification of the law of obligations in Europe; the basis of strict liability in particular and of responsibility generally in tort law; and aspects of products liability. These stimulating essays have much to say about the past, present and future of the law of obligations and will be of great interest to scholars and lawyers of all legal systems. From the editors' preface John Fleming was one of the most influential writers on the law of torts and comparative law in the English-speaking world this century. His towering contribution to scholarship is evidenced not only by the great prestige his work attracts in academic circles but also by the frequency and high respect with which his work is cited by judges in appellate courts of many jurisdictions. The authors of this collection of essays on the law of obligations intend it as a tribute to his achievements.