David Horton – Law School for Everyone: Contracts

Someone might want to buy or sell a product. The vehicle they use is a contract. Contract law is as broad as everything humans do.

Many people around the world enter into multiple contracts with a single click of a button. They change their legal landscape by doing that. They are subject to binding obligations. Sometimes they give up their rights, such as the power to recover for damaged property or the ability to go to court.

In. There is a law school for everyone. Professor David Horton of the University of California, Davis, School of Law is investigating contract law. Contract essentials include offers, acceptances, counteroffers, options, and defenses, as well as contract enforcement, such as fraud, duress, and unconscionability. The outrageous to the heart-rending to the ridiculous are some of the concepts that come alive in court cases. By the end, you will understand why contract law is a part of your daily life.

A contract is an agreement between two or more people or entities. In today’s digital world, we agree to contracts we haven’t read. It happens when you open a bank account, rent a car, join a gym, sign up for internet service, or start a new job.

There are several tough questions at the heart of a typical law school course in contract law.

• What does it mean to “agree” to a contract?
• Should courts blindly enforce fine print that nobody ever reads?
• Where’s the line between salesmanship and outright fraud?
• Should written contracts carry more weight than verbal ones?
• How wide a net should the law cast when it defines a party’s rights?

For lawyers-in-training and any consumer who wants a better understanding of how contracts enable us to plan, trade, and cooperate with one another, the answers are vital.

Blocks of contracts are legal.

The nature of the internet makes it possible for you to enter into a binding agreement without knowing it.

Professor Horton helps you understand the contracts of everyday life by breaking them down into their fundamental components. There is a law school for everyone. Demystifies concepts and terms that can seem intimidating to individuals outside of legal fields.

Get it immediately. David Horton is a student at the Law School for Everyone.

• Offers: According to Professor Horton, for a communication to be an offer, it must set forth the material terms of the deal, and the person making the offer (the offeror) must describe the proposed contract with enough specificity that the person receiving the offer (the offeree) can consummate the transaction by simply saying “yes” or “I accept.”
• Acceptances: Under what’s known as the “mailbox rule,” acceptance of an offer is operational the very moment it leaves the offeree’s possession. This doctrine gets its name from cases where the offeror makes an offer, the offeree writes a letter accepting the offer, the offeree places the letter in the mail—and then returns home only to find a letter from the offeror revoking the offer.
• Consideration: Lawyers use the word “consideration” as a shorthand for the benefit each party obtains from a contract. The consideration doctrine requires a contract to be supported by consideration in the sense that both parties agree to an exchange. This doctrine has deep and tangled roots that stretch all the way back to Justinian Rome.
• Fraud: In contract law, fraud comes in two flavors. The first is misrepresentation, under which a party can annul a deal if assent is induced by either a fraudulent or material false statement of fact which the party is justified in relying on. The second is fraud in the execution, which applies when one party misleads another about the contents of a contract, and the victim justifiably relies on the wrongdoer’s statement.
• Promises: A basic building block of contracts, promises are a party’s core obligation under the contract. Promises are connected to each other through constructive conditions. For example, when a party makes a promise, it is as if it says to the other party: “I promise to perform, but only on the implied condition that you also perform. If you don’t perform, then I won’t perform.”

Contract law education is unlike any other.

To help you better understand how far-reaching a field contract law is, Professor Horton packs these lectures with eye-opening court cases that illustrate the topics and concepts covered in each lecture.

You will examine many cases. There is a law school for everyone. Are those involved?

• A contract for the sale of a farm written on a piece of scratch paper,
• A young man who claimed a soda company owed him a fighter jet, and
• Two companies that couldn’t agree on the meaning of the word “chicken.”

Professor Horton shatters the stereotype of contract law as dry and complex and transforms it into a profoundly accessible learning experience. A course in contract law and an education in the American legal system is unlike anything you will find outside a top-tier law school.