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Is Silence Gold Case Study

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Is Silence gold? Law of school LLM program Hong Qiong Eid: 55184752 Introduction: There is a famous Chinese saying “silence is gold” which means silence makes someone benefit from it. But in Felthouse v Bindley case, we learned silence may be not “gold” (chances of making contract with other people). In the case silence means no communication of the acceptance by the offeree to the offeror in the circumstances that the offeror states that no need to reply for the acceptance. The case sets a rule that silence to an offer cannot generally be considered as acceptance. McKendrick states in his book, Contract Law: text, cases and materials ‘the general rule is that silence does not amount to an acceptance’ and the rule is a good one’ , he analyzes it further ‘the law would be burdensome if it imposed on people an obligation to take …show more content…

I agree with the statement that the general rule is a good one, but we should recognize that every rule has its exceptions; the analysis of McKendrick is based on that the rule will avoid unwanted contracts. Thus McKendrick’s comment is on bilateral contract, we will discuss the rule under the bilateral contracts circumstance. In order to make it clear, let’s first focus on why the rule is a good one. 1.The general rule “Silence cannot amount to acceptance” is really necessary in the modern economic society. If silence can amount to acceptance, the merchants can send the offer by saying “no reply with 10 days will amount to acceptance”, so we will be left in a situation to reply every offer that we don’t want to accept, just like McKendrick’s analysis, it will be “unduly burdensome”, and the social costs on this would be unaccountable. It is also unfair to impose an obligation to the offeree who doesn’t want to accept an offer but has to spend time and expenses to reject it. This is the

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