with its completion. On a number of occasions, Lord Denning expressed the view that the ‘offer and acceptance’ perspective was often artificial. For example, in Gibson v Manchester City Council, a dispute arose over whether a binding contract to sell a council house had been formed, despite apparently incomplete ‘accord’ via the offer and acceptance process. Lord Denning stated that, instead, one ought to ‘look at the correspondence as a whole and at the conduct of the parties, and see therefrom whether the parties have come to an agreement on everything that was material’. In general, Lord Denning’s views have not been received sympathetically, as the following passage from Lord Diplock’s judgment in the House of Lords in the same case makes only too clear: Gibson v Manchester City Council [1979] 1 WLR 294, HL, p 297

doi:10.4324/9781843141518-20

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with its completion. On a number of occasions, Lord Denning expressed the view that the ‘offer and acceptance’ perspective was often artificial. For example, in Gibson v Manchester City Council, a dispute arose over whether a binding contract to sell a council house had been formed, despite apparently incomplete ‘accord’ via the offer and acceptance process. Lord Denning stated that, instead, one ought to ‘look at the correspondence as a whole and at the conduct of the parties, and see therefrom whether the parties have come to an agreement on everything that was material’. In general, Lord Denning’s views have not been received sympathetically, as the following passage from Lord Diplock’s judgment in the House of Lords in the same case makes only too clear: Gibson v Manchester City Council [1979] 1 WLR 294, HL, p 297

ABSTRACT

In general, Lord Denning’s views have not been received sympathetically, as the following passage from Lord Diplock’s judgment in the House of Lords in the same case makes only too clear:

Gibson v Manchester City Council [1979] 1 WLR 294, HL, p 297 Lord Diplock: My Lords, there may be certain types of contract, though I think they are exceptional, which do not fit easily into the normal analysis of a contract as being constituted by offer and acceptance; but a contract alleged to have been made by an exchange of correspondence between the parties in which the successive communications other than the first are in reply to one another, is not one of these. I can see no reason in the instant case for departing from the conventional approach of looking at the handful of documents relied upon as constituting the contract sued upon and seeing whether upon their true construction there is to be found in them a contractual offer by the corporation to sell the house to Mr Gibson and an acceptance of that offer by Mr Gibson. I venture to think that it was by departing from this conventional approach that the majority of the Court of Appeal was led into error.11