ABSTRACT
Short problem questions dealing with a particular legal doctrine are regularly used in university law schools to encourage students to take the concepts and rules they have learnt about and apply them to new fact patterns. One of the main aims of such exercises is to encourage students to apply the abstract to the specific and to test the limits of a doctrine or judgment. The disputes which contracting parties bring before the court will each have unique elements. What we ask students to do in applying doctrine to new cases is to establish whether the fact pattern before them is sufficient to bring it within a particular doctrine or judicial line of reasoning or not. Exam papers up and down the country are full of problem questions which attempt to stretch the application of the contractual canon to its limits.
