Contract Law Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 1

Contract Law - Essay Example If the seller does not deliver the goods as promised and the buyer has to seek alternative sources to acquire the same goods with perhaps a higher price than the earlier agreed upon price, then the buyer has legal redress because his expectations have been compromised and the contract was aimed at protecting his interests in terms of a future rise in the price of the goods he intended to acquire (Feldman and Teichman 46). On the other hand, the seller’s interests of safeguarding against reduction in price are also protected at the time of making the contract. Any failure to meet the terms of the agreement by the two parties is against the provisions of Contract Law and calls legal compensation through court or arbitration process. The drafting of doctrines of Contract Law and the subsequent operationalization in England and USA1 began in the middle of the 19th century when rules of contract law were first put in place in cases such as Hadley v. Baxendale2 in 1894, Raffles v. W ichelhaus3 in 1864 among others. These are historic legal cases that law students all over the world read to better understand contract law. With the development of free markets and expansion of free economies together with laissez faire management, the legal framework of the free market4 was predominantly the contract principles (Hunt 695). Common law is the chief source of the law of contract, and is a makeup of many judicial decisions by courts on similar disputes over a long time in the past. Courts use earlier precedents as sources of law as input to determine the principles of present and future decisions on similar or related disputes. Another source of contract law in the USA has been the restatements of the law promulgated by the American Law institute5, which are a mixture of past cases and predictions of future cases together with prescriptive pronouncements from different fields such as Contracts, Torts, Property, Agency, Employment, Franchising relationships, constructi ons and others. Closely related to contract law and specific to a myriad of commercial subjects is the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) which is yet another source of contract law and which contains separate articles like bank deposits and collections, negotiable instruments and letters of credit and security interests. Article 2 in this code governs transactions in the sale of goods. The other source is the CISG6 or the Vienna Convention which governs international sales transactions thus applying to sale of goods and services between parties who operate in different countries but both countries must have agreed to the provisions of the convention (Marquez-Escobar 122). The UCC has not received Federal legislation attention because it is still being enacted separately by different states with no notable effort to unify it at national level. Features of Contract Law Offer and acceptance, consideration and an intention to create legal relations are the key elements to the creation of a contract in common law. Offer and acceptance which may be written, oral or implied is the most important feature where one party offers a bargain that is accepted by the other party, a scenario also referred to as concurrence of wills for which concrete