First Year: Contract Law A

This course aims to introduce students to common law reasoning involving contracts.  Various judicial rules concerning the enforcement of promises and agreements will be examined, which will serve to hone our understanding of those rules and to develop our ability to use them in legal argument.  The matters considered comprise the requirements for enforceability, remedies for breach, the effect of contracts on third parties, the effect of writing, and excuses for non-performance, the latter of which include unfairness, unexpected circumstances, and public policy.  The emphasis will not be on the content of those rules so much as on the method deployed to extract them from cases, to apply them in new cases, and to track their evolution over time.