Law Binding Contract

Keith is also refusing to pay the extra £2,000 promised to Tech Ltd and Simon is also seeking to recover the £50 promised by Keith.

There is consideration present here since according to the ‘Doctrine of Consideration, ' promises will legally enforceable if you ‘ask for something in return for ' something else. Here, Ken asks for £12,000 in return for his work to build Jack 's conservatory. Therefore, when Jack ‘accordingly contacts Ken to say that he will be employing him to do the building work, ' Jack has accepted Ken 's offer, and both parties have entered into a legally binding contract. Jack 's statement qualifies as an acceptance since there is correspondence between the two parties, whereby both the offer and acceptance are on the same terms; there is nexus, where the acceptance is in response to the offer; and finally, there is communication on both parts. Moreover, when Jack states that he will accept the ‘most competitive ' tender, he could argue that the recommendation from ‘Barnie, ' his ‘neighbour ' who expresses that ‘Ken is an excellent builder ' constitutes Jack 's meaning of the ‘most competitive. ' However, this is not relevant unless Bob wishes to argue in court that Jack 's proposal was indeed an invitation to tender, which constitutes an offer, as according to Harvela.

The law of contract requires that there must also be evidence of an intention to create legal relations between the parties. However it is usually held that the decision is against the intention for an agreement domestic in nature to be legally binding, such as in the case of Cohen v Cohen where an agreement between family members that may be morally binding will not necessarily create a lawfully binding contract. However there are exceptions to this. When both parties show an intention to enter a legally binding arrangement and it would be unreasonable for one party to revoke their decision, the arrangement holds evidence of a possible contract.

The principle of law is that for a valid contract to be formed there must be an agreement reached by both parties.

Intention to create legal relations can be defined as follows. ‘An agreement will only become a legally binding contract if the parties intend this to be so. This will be strongly presumed in the case of business agreements but presumed otherwise if the agreement is of a friendly, social or domestic nature.’ Source (HNC unit 5 Business law course book) In determining whether the parties intend their agreements to be legally binding the court is guided by two presumptions. Parties to a domestic or social agreement do not intend to be legally bond. Parties

t. P1) An agreement cannot bind unless both parties to the agreement know what they are doing and freely choose to do it.

Furthermore, the agreement, is where the actual contract is offered and accepted by two parties (Cheeseman, 2010). The consideration is the legal form of payment or exchange within the contract such as money, property, or provision of services (Cheeseman,

Four elements are necessary for a contract to exist. According to Kubasek et al., (2012) “These elements are the agreement, the consideration, contractual capacity, and a legal object,” (p. 304). The agreement consists of an offer from one party and an acceptance from

6. Assuming, arguendo, that this e-mail does constitute an agreement, what consideration supports this agreement?

P1.1 explain the importance of the essential elements required for the formation of a valid contract

By an agreement in writing, prepared without professional assistance, and headed “Agreement between C. and the O. Company”, C. granted to the company, in consideration of the sum of £5, the sole right for a specified period to quarry and remove stone from land owned by him and the company agreed to pay royalties at rates specified in the agreement. The agreement also contained provision for its extension and an authority by C. to the company to pay all moneys connected with the agreement to his wife and himself as joint tenants. The agreement was signed by C., by a person on behalf of the company and by the wife.

Mutual assent and consideration go together so this paper will argue against them together. Mutual assent is the idea that all the parties in a contract know what they are contracting to and agree to it. As defined in Charles S. Knapp, Nathan M. Crystal, and Harry G. Prince’s Problems in

The Supreme Court of Queensland, in the recent case of Baldwin & Anor v Icon Energy Ltd & Anor [2015] QSC 12, had to give consideration as to whether the ‘ agreement to negotiate’ is legally binding on the parties. The solicitors for the defendants ‘Icon Energy Ltd’ and their wholly owned subsidiary ‘Jakabar PTY LTD’ were Hopgood Ganim. The solicitor for ‘Ronald Baldwin’ and ‘Souther Fairway Investments PTY LTD’ was Clayton Utz.

A contract is an exchange of promises or a promise in exchange for performance, for breach of which the law gives a remedy, per Restatement 2nd of Contracts §1. For the contract to be valid there has to be mutual assent, parties mutually agree upon the same specific thing. Per Restatement 2nd of Contracts §54, there are two types of contracts: unilateral, where acceptance is by performance, and bilateral, where there is an exchange of mutual promises and both of the parties have the rights and duties.

When determining whether an agreement exists between parties we must look at the intentions of each party. It is possible to analyse the intentions of parties from either a subjective or objective viewpoint. The subjective viewpoint looks at what the party’s themselves actually intended to obtain from an agreement and can be accomplished by simply asking each party what their intentions were.