ABSTRACT
It is usual for textbooks to cite how all our daily transactions, from buying a newspaper or riding on a bus to our employment, are all examples of contracts, but the point is nonetheless valid and well made. We are all players in the contract game, even if we do not realise it. In fact, we probably will not have any need to recognise that particular contractual version of reality until we enter into some transaction that goes wrong, or at least does not go as we hoped it would. Then, we seek to assert rights and to look for remedies against the person with whom we have come into dispute. It is at this time that the analytical framework of contract law principles comes to bear on the situation, to determine what, if any, rights can be enforced and what, if any, remedies can be recovered. It is perhaps paradoxical that students of contract law have to approach their study of the subject from the opposite end from that at which the layperson begins. The layperson wants a remedy and focuses on that above all else; the student, or practitioner, realises that the availability of the remedy depends upon establishing contractual responsibility and, hence, their focus is on the establishment of the contractual relationship and the breach of that relationship, before any question of remedies can be considered. Such is the nature and relationship of law and ordinary, everyday reality.
