CPLC Seminar: 'Why On Earth Do We Still Teach Undergraduates About the Doctrine of Consideration?’

Speaker: Dr Jonathan Morgan, University of Cambridge

This seminar is open to all LLM, MCL and PhD students, Faculty members and Faculty visitors.

This is work towards a chapter on 'bargain' in a forthcoming book of essays, Reimagining Contract Pedagogy. Bargain (or exchange) is one of a number of overlapping concepts used by English law to denote when parties' agreements become legally enforceable contracts. The other concepts are 'intention', 'formality' and 'reliance'. The quirks of historical development, rather than rational planning, have created a complex legal picture. Some conceptual pruning could be desirable. To undertake it raises the basic question of which agreements ought properly to fall within the legal category of 'contract'. Does the dividing line map precisely onto the distinction between bargained-for and 'gratuitous' promises? It is suggested that the issues raised when existing contracts are modified are so different that the bargain principle could be radically rethought for enforcement of variations. A related pedagogical question (something under direct academic control in a way that doctrine, of course, is not) is whether variation of contracts should be considered as a quite separate topic.