Background Elements: Contract Curve and Expectation Damages; Consideration and the Bargained-for Exchange; Contract Formation; Unfairness and Unconscionability; Contract Interpretation; Performance and Breach; Mistake and Impossibility; Remedies; Third-Party Beneficiaries.

Background Elements: Contract Curve and Expectation Damages; Consideration and the Bargained-for Exchange; Contract Formation; Unfairness and Unconscionability; Contract Interpretation; Performance and Breach; Mistake and Impossibility; Remedies; Third-Party Beneficiaries.

This efficient and exceedingly effective guide to Contracts will help you see the big picture. The authors focus on making the key concepts of contract law, and the relationship among those concepts, easier to understand and retain. The authors have also infused the book with humor, believing there is nothing inconsistent between a rigorous academic experience and having a little fun. Each of the authors is nationally-renowned law teacher who has taught Contracts for decades. Based on that experience, in this book they have set forth understandable techniques for mastering the law governing each critical aspect of the contract relationship, including, contract formation (offer and acceptance), enforcement (consideration and defenses), interpretation, performance, breach, and remedies.

Every legal system must decide how to distinguish between agreements that are enforceable and those that are not. Formal bargains in the marketplace and casual promises in a social setting mark the two extremes, but many hard cases lie between. When gaps are left in a contract, how should courts fill them? What does it mean to say that an agreement is legally enforceable? If someone breaks a legally enforceable contract, what consequences follow? For 150 years, legal scholars have debated whether a set of coherent principles provide answers to such basic questions. Oliver Wendell Holmes put forward the affirmative case, arguing that bargained-for consideration, expectation damages, and a handful of related ideas captured the essence of contract law. The work of the next several generations, culminating in Grant Gilmore’s The Death of Contract in 1974, took a contrary view. The coherence Holmes had tried to bring to the field was illusory. It was more sensible to see contracts as merely a species of civil obligation and resist the temptation to impose rigid and artificial rules. In Reconstructing Contracts, Douglas Baird takes stock of the current state of contract doctrine and in the process reinvigorates the classic framework of Anglo-American contract law. He shows that Holmes’s principles are fundamentally sound. Even if they lack that talismanic quality formerly ascribed to them, properly understood they continue to provide the best guide to contracts for a new generation of students, practitioners, and judges.

This book is a combination of schematic flowcharts that visually plot basic rules of contract law and selected cases that apply such rules. The flowchart approach helps students sort out the various contracts rules in an organized way.

Contracts: Cases and Theory has two principal ambitions: first, to present the basic doctrine of contracts in a comprehensive and coherent fashion; and second, to encourage a rigorous and interdisciplinary approach to thinking about the values and principles that inspire the law. The book provides a systematic survey of contract law while weaving in perspectives from economics, philosophy, sociology, and legal theory, to show how these disciplines can be used to both illuminate and criticize the law as it stands. The book's treatments of "law and" ideas are designed to be free-standing, making the book an excellent introduction to interdisciplinary legal thought for students without prior training in other fields.

Hardbound - New, hardbound print book.

CasebookPlus Hardbound - New, hardbound print book includes lifetime digital access to an eBook, with the ability to highlight and take notes, and 12-month access to a digital Learning Library that includes self-assessment quizzes tied to this book, leading study aids, an outline starter, and Gilbert Law Dictionary.