ABSTRACT
In a lecture given some years ago Lord Scarman expressed the view that the law of contract ‘if studied in abstraction … is no more than a generalised theory about the nature and consequences of agreement coupled with rules … as to the meaning of words and phrases’. This remark quite clearly carries with it criticism of approaches to the study of contract law which place undue emphasis on abstract principles. In this book we argue that a study of contract law is dangerously abstract if it concentrates on legal analysis and technicalities at the expense of how contract functions in everyday life – particularly business life.
