At common law, damages are a remedy in the form of a monetary award to be paid to a claimant as compensation for loss or injury. To warrant the award, the claimant must show that a breach of duty has caused foreseeable loss. To be recognised at law, the loss must involve damage to property, or mental or physical injury; pure economic loss is rarely recognised for the award of damages.
Estoppel is a judicial device in common law legal systems whereby a court may prevent, or "estop" a person from making assertions or from going back on his or her word; the person being sanctioned is "estopped". Estoppel may prevent someone from bringing a particular claim. Legal doctrines of estoppel are based in both common law and equity.
A quasi-contract is a fictional contract recognised by a court. The notion of a quasi-contract can be traced to Roman law and is still a concept used in some modern legal systems.
Quantum meruit is a Latin phrase meaning "what one has earned". In the context of contract law, it means something along the lines of "reasonable value of services".
The forms of action were the different procedures by which a legal claim could be made during much of the history of the English common law. Depending on the court, a plaintiff would purchase a writ in Chancery which would set in motion a series of events eventually leading to a trial in one of the medieval common law courts. Each writ entailed a different set of procedures and remedies which together amounted to the "form of action".
The law of restitution is the law of gains-based recovery. It is to be contrasted with the law of compensation, which is the law of loss-based recovery. When a court orders restitution it orders the defendant to give up his/her gains to the claimant. When a court orders compensation it orders the defendant to pay the claimant for his or her loss.
Assumpsit, or more fully, action in assumpsit, was a form of action at common law used to enforce what are now called obligations arising in tort and contract; and in some common law jurisdictions, unjust enrichment.
Hadley v Baxendale [1854] EWHC J70 is a leading English contract law case. It sets the leading rule to determine consequential damages from a breach of contract: a breaching party is liable for all losses that the contracting parties should have foreseen, but is not liable for any losses that the breaching party could not have foreseen on the information available to him.
Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when one person intentionally damages someone else's contractual or business relationships with a third party causing economic harm. As an example, someone could use blackmail to induce a contractor into breaking a contract, or they could obstruct someone's ability to honor a contract with a client by deliberately refusing to deliver necessary goods.
Balfour v Balfour [1919] 2 KB 571 is a leading English contract law case. It held that there is a rebuttable presumption against an intention to create a legally enforceable agreement when the agreement is domestic in nature.
Ex turpi causa non oritur actio is a legal doctrine which states that a plaintiff will be unable to pursue legal remedy if it arises in connection with his own illegal act. Particularly relevant in the law of contract, tort and trusts, ex turpi causa is also known as the illegality defence, since a defendant may plead that even though, for instance, he broke a contract, conducted himself negligently or broke an equitable duty, nevertheless a claimant by reason of his own illegality cannot sue. The UK Supreme Court provided a thorough reconsideration of the doctrine in 2016 in Patel v Mirza.
The history of Roman Law can be divided into three systems of procedure: that of legis actiones, the formulary system, and cognitio extra ordinem. The periods in which these systems were in use overlapped one another and did not have definitive breaks, but it can be stated that the legis actio system prevailed from the time of the XII Tables until about the end of the 2nd century BC, that the formulary procedure was primarily used from the last century of the Republic until the end of the classical period, and that of cognitio extra ordinem was in use in post-classical times.
MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co., 217 N.Y. 382, 111 N.E. 1050 (1916) is a famous New York Court of Appeals opinion by Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo which removed the requirement of privity of contract for duty in negligence actions.
Adams v Lindsell(1818) 1 B & Ald 681, is an English contract case regarded as the first case towards the establishment of the "postal rule" for acceptance of an offer. Ordinarily, any form of acceptance must be communicated expressly to an offeror; however, it was found that where a letter of acceptance is posted, an offer is accepted "in course of post".
Pando v. Fernandez, 127 Misc.2d 224, is a New York case that arose when Christopher Pando, a deeply religious minor, sought to impose a constructive trust on the proceeds of a winning $2.8 million ticket that he purchased with Dasyi Fernandez's money. Pando alleged that Mrs. Fernandez agreed to share the prize money equally with him if he prayed to a saint to cause the numbers he picked for her to be the winning numbers. At the time that Pando purchased the ticket, Mrs. Fernandez was 38 and the mother of three children on welfare. Christopher Pando was 16 and was a friend of her son. Mrs. Fernandez denied that she ever asked Pando to buy the tickets or pick the numbers, and also denied the fact that she offered to share her money with him.
Williams v Carwardine [1833] EWHC KB J44 is an English contract law case which concerns how a contract comes about through the offer of a reward. It also raises interesting questions about the necessity of reliance on an offer in the formation of a contract.
Baltic Shipping Company v Dillon, the Mikhail Lermontov case, is a leading Australian contract law case, on the incorporation of exclusion clauses and damages for breach of contract or restitution for unjust enrichment.
Slade's Case was a case in English contract law that ran from 1596 to 1602. Under the medieval common law, claims seeking the repayment of a debt or other matters could only be pursued through a writ of debt in the Court of Common Pleas, a problematic and archaic process. By 1558 the lawyers had succeeded in creating another method, enforced by the Court of King's Bench, through the action of assumpsit, which was technically for deceit. The legal fiction used was that by failing to pay after promising to do so, a defendant had committed deceit, and was liable to the plaintiff. The conservative Common Pleas, through the appellate court the Court of Exchequer Chamber, began to overrule decisions made by the King's Bench on assumpsit, causing friction between the courts.
Kirksey v. Kirksey, Ala. Sup. 8 Ala. 131 (1845), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of Alabama that held that a promise by a man to give his sister-in-law a house if she would move to his land was not a valid contract because it lacked bargained-for-consideration.
Yaxley v Gotts [1999] is an English contract law case with specific relevance to formalities in land law. The case deals with whether section 2 of the Law of Property Act 1989 which requires that contracts be in writing prevents an oral contract from taking effect where otherwise an interest would arise by proprietary estoppel, i.e. whether the provision in subsection 5 on resulting, implied or constructive trusts covers also proprietary estoppel.
