Obligations Contracts

Contract as Promise is a study of the philosophical foundations of contract law in which Professor Fried effectively answers some of the most common assumptions about contract law and strongly proposes a moral basis for it while defending the classical theory of contract. This book provides two purposes regarding the complex legal institution of the contract. The first is the theoretical purpose to demonstrate how contract law can be traced to and is determined by a small number of basic moral principles. At the theory level the author shows that contract law does have an underlying, and unifying structure. The second is a pedagogic purpose to provide for students the underlying structure of contract law. At this level of doctrinal exposition the author shows that structure can be referred to moral principles. Together the two purposes support each other in an effective and comprehensive study of contract law. This second edition retains the original text, and includes a new Preface. It also includes a substantial new essay entitled Contract as Promise in the Light of Subsequent Scholarship--Especially Law and Economics which serves as a retrospective of the work accomplished in the last thirty years, while responding to present and future work in the field.

Obligations: Contract Law is a clear and concise textbook which covers a considerable amount of recent developments in the law, including the decision of the House of Lords in Sirius International Insurance (Publ) v FAI General Insurance Ltd (2004) on interpretation of commercial documents and Jackson v Royal Bank of Scotland plc (2005) on damages: loss of repeat orders.

This book extensively analyses obligations connected to property rights, or 'real obligations', in a comparative perspective through a study of Belgian, French, Dutch and Scots law. Examples of real obligations are the periodical payment obligation of a long lease holder, the maintenance of the property subject to a servitude and the financial contributions by apartment owners. A real obligation differs in several aspects from a personal obligation. A real obligation is for instance so closely connected to a property right that the obligation transfers automatically to the transferee of the property right. After defining real obligations and the exclusion of several related legal mechanisms in Part I, the regime of real obligations is analysed in Part II. The liability of both the transferor and transferee for real obligations, which are for many property rights underregulated, for instance, are analysed in detail. Those findings are applied to the specific property rights in Part III, so that particular problems for a specific property right are also analysed and, where possible, solved. For instance the role of party autonomy in the creation of a long lease right is studied. Also the different obligations which can be connected to a servitude are delineated. Part IV deals with legal mechanisms most of which have recently been introduced, allowing to connect obligations to a piece of property, outside the traditional framework of property rights, such as the Dutch 'qualitative obligation' and the French obligation relle environnementale. The book ends with a discussion of the possibility and desirability of the (broader) introduction of such real obligations, which could entail the introduction of new property rights sui generis.