ABSTRACT
Agreement lies at the heart of our understanding of contract law, and most teachers begin with this topic when structuring any course of contract teaching. Agreement as a concept has an intuitive, easily understood explanatory force, hence its enduring popularity with courts, academic writers, and teachers. This chapter wants to examine the teaching of contract law, before moving on to looking at teaching at the authors' institution at the time. It offers some suggestions for future development of agreement-based pedagogy. Agreement is usually analysed as an offer made by one party accepted by the other party. A performance-related agreement is taught as the defining feature of contract, albeit one which is constrained by considerations such as its trifling, indeterminate, nature, and requirements of capacity and form. The objective position the law takes when assessing agreement is explained, with citation made of the remark of Lord Dunedin that “commercial contracts cannot be arranged by what people think in their inmost minds.
