This book analyses enrichment law and its development and underpinning in social culture within three geographical regions: the United States, western members of the European Union and the late Ottoman Empire. These regions correspond, though imperfectly, with three different legal traditions: the American, continental and Islamic traditions. The book argues that we should understand law as a mimetic artefact. In so doing, it explains how typical patterns and exemplary articulations of wrongful enrichment law capture and reiterate vocal cultural themes found in the respective regions. The book identifies remarkable affinities between poetic tendencies, structures and default dispositions of wrongful enrichment law and cultural world views. It offers bold accounts of each region's law and culture providing fertile grounds for external and comparative elucidations of the legal doctrine.

The collapse of the Rana Plaza in Bangladesh (2013) is one of many cases to invoke critical scrutiny and moral outrage regarding the conditions under which consumer goods sold on our markets are produced elsewhere. In spite of abiding moral concerns, these goods remain popular and consumers continue to buy them. Such transactions for goods made under deplorable production conditions are usually presumed to count as 'normal' market transactions, ie transactions that are recognized as valid consumer-contracts under the rules of contract law. Minimum Contract Justice challenges this presumption of normality. It explores the question of how theories of justice bear on such consumer contracts; how should a society treat a transaction for a good made under deplorable conditions elsewhere? This Book defends the position that a society that strives to be minimally just should not lend its power to enforce, support, or encourage transactions that are incompatible with the ability of others elsewhere to live decent human lives. As such, the book introduces a new perspective on the legal debate concerning deplorable production conditions that has settled around ideas of corporate responsibility, and the pursuit of international labour rights.

'...provides everything you want in a case book: a stimulating, thought-provoking and up to date account of contract law. It combines both fantastic academic commentary and superbly selected materials making it simply one of the best contract law casebooks.' Student Law Journal This is the seventh, fully updated, edition of Professor Burrows' Casebook, offering law students the ideal way to discover and understand contract law through reading highlights from the leading cases. Designed to be used either on its own or to supplement a contract law textbook, this book covers the undergraduate contract law course in a series of clearly presented and carefully structured chapters. The author provides an expert introduction to each topic and his succinct notes and questions seek to guide students to a proper understanding of the cases. The relevant statutes are also set out along with a principled analysis of them. In addition to cross-references to further discussion in the leading textbooks, an innovative feature is the summary of leading academic articles in each chapter. The book is designed not to overwhelm students by its length but covers all aspects of the law of contract most commonly found in the undergraduate curriculum.

Contract and Copyright Drafting Skills is a brand new title which will help you develop and create greater flexibility in your drafting skills. Using clear explanations and practical examples your ability to write clauses, draft, negotiate, analyse and review contracts will be enhanced. It is designed to be used in conjunction with your own precedent bank or alongside The A-Z of Contract Clauses, Sixth Edition. This title gives guidance on the variety of techniques that can be used in drafting contracts including the significance of the purpose of the agreement and the focus of the outcome. In addition it covers definitions, an important aspect of contract drafting, and also general background factors that can be useful to consider when drafting a contract. Contract and Copyright Drafting Skills will help you to appreciate the elements that can be edited in a clause thereby widening, decreasing or improving liability, risk, costs, revenue and control of rights. It also explains the process of the expansion, reduction and adaptation of clauses to meet the needs of the circumstances of the parties giving you the confidence to make that assessment and to focus on the aim of achieving the best agreement in the circumstances. Whether new to contact drafting or an experienced contract drafter, whether a lawyer or non-lawyer Contract and Copyright Drafting Skills will provide you with all the tools and guidance you need to become an expert contract drafter.

The development of the law of obligations across the common law world has been, and continues to be, a story of unity and divergence. Its common origins continue to exert a powerful stabilising influence, carried forward by a methodology that places heavy weight on the historical foundations of legal principles. Divergence is, however, produced by numerous factors, including national and international human rights instruments, local statutory regimes, civil law influences, regional harmonisation, local circumstances and values and different political and legal cultures. The essays in this collection explore the forces that produce divergence, the countervailing forces that generate cohesion and consistency in the common law of obligations, and the influence that the major common law jurisdictions continue to exert over one another in this area of law. The chapters in this book were originally presented at the Seventh Biennial Conference on the Law of Obligations held in Hong Kong in July 2014. A second collection, entitled Divergences in Private Law (ISBN: 9781782256601), will focus on particular departures from the common law mainstream and the causes and effects of those deviations.

An oft-repeated assertion within contract law scholarship and cases is that a good contract law (or a good commercial contract law) will meet the needs and expectations of commercial contractors. Despite the prevalence of this statement, relatively little attention has been paid to why this should be the aim of contract law, how these 'commercial expectations' are identified and given substance, and what precise legal techniques might be adopted by courts to support the practices and expectations of business people. This book explores these neglected issues within contract law. It examines the idea of commercial expectation, identifying what expectations commercial contractors may have about the law and their business relationships (using empirical studies of contracting behaviour), and assesses the extent to which current contract law reflects these expectations. It considers whether supporting commercial expectations is a justifiable aim of the law according to three well-established theoretical approaches to contractual obligations: rights-based explanations, efficiency-based (or economic) explanations and the relational contract critique of the classical law. It explores the specific challenges presented to contract law by modern commercial relationships and the ways in which the general rules of contract law could be designed and applied in order to meet these challenges. Ultimately the book seeks to move contract law beyond a simple dichotomy between contextualist and formalist legal reasoning, to a more nuanced and responsive legal approach to the regulation of commercial agreements.

The central theme of this book is that an economic framework--incorporating such concepts as information asymmetry, moral hazard, and adaptation to changed circumstances--is appropriate for contract interpretation, analyzing contract disputes, and developing contract doctrine. The value of the approach is demonstrated through the close analysis of major contract cases. In many of the cases, had the court (and the litigators) understood the economic context, the analysis and results would have been very different. Topics and some representative cases include consideration (Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon), interpretation (Bloor v. Falstaff and Columbia Nitrogen v. Royster), remedies (Campbell v. Wentz, Tongish v. Thomas, and Parker v. Twentieth Century Fox), and excuse (Alcoa v. Essex).

It is a matter of some difficulty for the English lawyer to predict the effect of a misapprehension upon the formation of a contract. The common law doctrine of mistake is a confused one, with contradictory theoretical underpinnings and seemingly irreconcilable cases. This book explains the common law doctrine through an examination of the historical development of the doctrine in English law. Beginning with an overview of contractual mistakes in Roman law, the book examines how theories of mistake were received at various points into English contract law from Roman and civil law sources. These transplants, made for pragmatic rather than principled reasons, combined in an uneasy manner with the pre-existing English contract law. The book also examines the substantive changes brought about in contractual mistake by the Judicature Act 1873 and the fusion of law and equity. Through its historical examination of mistake in contract law, the book provides not only insights into the nature of innovation and continuity within the common law but also the fate of legal transplants.

This is the third and last part of the Principles of European Contract Law prepared by the Commission of European Contract Law under the chairmanship of Professor Ole Lando. Parts I and II were published in 2000 and have attracted great interest and acclaim and a growing volume of secondary literature. This present volume follows the same pattern - a set of proposed Articles drawn up by the Commission, followed by comments and national notes contining a wealth of comparative law. The subjects dealt with in Part III are: plurality of debtors and creditors, assignment, substitution of new debtor and transfer of contract, set-off, prescription, illegality, conditions and capitalization of interest. No self-respecting contract lawyer in Europe can afford to ignore the "Lando Principles." They are not only a useful and convenient source of information about current laws in the countries of the European Union but also a possible blueprint for the contract part of a future European civil code. They are a touchstone against which any discussion of contract law can be tested. The book will be particularly useful to those engaged in arbitrations with and international element, to those concerned with comparative law, and to those interested in the development of legal policy on contract law at national, European or international level.

This work traces the history of the English Law of obligations from the twelfth century to the present day. It aims to cut through technicalities and to be comprehensible to readers other than specialist legal historians. It should be of interest to all those wanting to understand how the English Common law has revolved.

Good faith is already a familiar concept in international commercial law and a recognised principle of substantive law in several major legal systems. In the United Kingdom,however, a role for good faith and, more fundamentally, the issue of whether or not there ought to be a general principle of good faith informing English and Scots contract and property law, are still matters for debate. This book, containing the papers delivered at the Symposium on Good Faith in Contract and Property Law held in Aberdeen University in October 1998, engages in that critical debate. While its central core reflects on good faith from the perspective of a mixed legal system (Scots Law), papers on good faith from an English and European perspective locate the debate, properly, within a broader jurisdictional context.

The Economic Contract Law of China: Legitimation and Contract Autonomy in the PRC

This book brings together a series of contributions by leading scholars and practitioners to examine the main features of smart contracts, as well as the response of key stakeholders in technology, business, government and the law. It explores how this new technology interfaces with the goals and content of contract law, introducing and evaluating several mechanisms to improve the 'observability' and reduce the costs of verifying contractual obligations and performance. It also outlines various 'design patterns' that ensure that end users are protected from themselves, prevent cognitive accidents, and translate expectations and values into more user-oriented agreements. Furthermore, the chapters map the new risks associated with smart contracts, particularly for consumers, and consider how they might be alleviated. The book also discusses the challenge of integrating data protection and privacy concerns into the design of these agreements and the broad range of legal knowledge and skills required. The case for using smart contracts goes beyond 'contracts' narrowly defined, and they are increasingly used to disrupt traditional models of business organisation. The book discusses so-called decentralised autonomous organisations and decentralised finance as illustrations of this trend. This book is designed for those interested in looking to deepen their understanding of this game-changing new legal technology.

This book is a large-scale historical reconstruction of liberal legalism, from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, the moment in which the jurists forged the alliance between political liberalism and legal expertise embodied in classical private law doctrine, to the contemporary anxiety about the possibility of both a liberal solution to the problem of political justification and of law as a respectable form of expert knowledge. Each stage in the history is a moment of synthesis between a substantive and a methodological idea. The former is the liberal political theory of the period, purporting to provide a solution to the problem of political justification. The latter is a conception of legal method or science, supposedly vindicating the access of the expert to the political choices embodied in the law. Thus, each moment in the history of liberal legalism integrates a political theory with a jurisprudential conception. Although it reaches the unsettling conclusion that liberal legalism has largely failed by its own standards, the book urges us to avoid quietism, scepticism or cynicism, in the hope that a deeper understanding of the fragility of our values and institutions inspires a more thoughtful, broadminded and nurtured citizenship.

This Nutshell provides a comprehensive guide to the law of contracts. It contains detailed explanations of contract concepts under both the common law and Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code, as well as the basics of restitution law. It also provides an extensive introduction to contracts in the digital age.

This report compares the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) with other free trade agreements and suggests how policy makers can promote its successful implementation. The analysis in this report aims to support policy makers and negotiators in RCEP implementation by identifying areas where further work is needed to make the agreement more attractive to firms and investors. The report shows that despite RCEP's shortcomings it presents valuable opportunities to deepen regional economic integration. Critically important are the agreement's built-in provisions and economic and technical cooperation measures that make it possible to expand its depth and coverage in the future.

This book provides original, diverse, and timely insights into the nature, scope, and implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially machine learning and natural language processing, in relation to contracting practices and contract law. The chapters feature unique, critical, and in-depth analysis of a range of topical issues, including how the use of AI in contracting affects key principles of contract law (from formation to remedies), the implications for autonomy, consent, and information asymmetries in contracting, and how AI is shaping contracting practices and the laws relating to specific types of contracts and sectors. The contributors represent an interdisciplinary team of lawyers, computer scientists, economists, political scientists, and linguists from academia, legal practice, policy, and the technology sector. The chapters not only engage with salient theories from different disciplines, but also examine current and potential real-world applications and implications of AI in contracting and explore feasible legal, policy, and technological responses to address the challenges presented by AI in this field. The book covers major common and civil law jurisdictions, including the EU, Italy, Germany, UK, US, and China. It should be read by anyone interested in the complex and fast-evolving relationship between AI, contract law, and related areas of law such as business, commercial, consumer, competition, and data protection laws.