Law School for Everyone: Contracts

How can you make sense of the everyday contracts in your life? Start with these lessons on contract law by an award-winning professor.

Overview Course No. 2015

What, exactly, are you doing when you 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?

Join Professor Horton for an accessible introduction to contract essentials, including offers, acceptances, counteroffers, and options and defenses, to contract enforcement, such as fraud, duress, and unconscionability. In lectures that demystify concepts and terms that can often seem intimidating to individuals outside of legal fields, you’ll better understand (and navigate) the contracts of everyday life.

Legal concepts come alive in court cases that range from the outrageous to the heart-rending to the ridiculous. Among the many cases you’ll examine are those involving 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. The result is an education in contract law—and in the American legal system—that’s unlike anything you’ll find outside a top-tier law school.

Course Structure

01: Contract Formation in the Internet Age

In today’s age of electronic contracts like browsewraps and clickwraps, contract law can entangle you without ever knowing it. Use internet-era contracts as a jumping-off point for exploring the objective theory of contracts and the critical role that the manifestation of assent plays in the formation of a binding contract.
Duration: 32 min

02: Understanding Offer and Acceptance

How can you tell when parties have forged a contract? In this lecture, use two famous court cases to examine why agreements often are the product of a process known as offer and acceptance. Also, learn about the two bodies of law that make up contracts: the common law and the Uniform Commercial Code.
Duration: 35 min

03: The Mysterious Consideration Doctrine

Use the classic case of Hamer v. Sidway as an introduction to one of contract law’s great mysteries: the doctrine known as consideration. First, define this elusive rule. Then, discuss its history and the lively debate over its policy purposes. Finally, take a brief look at the consideration doctrine’s contemporary relevance.
Duration: 33 min

04: Contract Offers You Can’t Revoke

Refine your understanding of contract formation by examining some situations that buck this niche’s general rules. Here, you’ll explore the slippery distinction between bilateral contracts and unilateral contracts. You’ll also study the special nature of (and limits on) firm offers.
Duration: 31 min

05: Liability without a Binding Contract

Promissory estoppel and restitution are two contract-like doctrines developed by the courts that sometimes allow a plaintiff to collect—even when elements of a contract are missing. In this lecture, unpack these liability theories and some of the reasons their issues remain unsettled to this day.
Duration: 31 min

06: Defenses to Contract: Fraud and Duress

Just because a party agreed to something doesn’t necessarily mean a court should treat that agreement as legitimate. Join Professor Horton for a closer look at several defenses to enforcement recognized by contract law, including duress (such as physical compulsion and improper threats) and fraud (including misrepresentation and “fraud in the execution”).
Duration: 29 min

07: Mistake and Other Contract Defenses

Some contractual agreements can be marred by mistakes: beliefs not in accord with the facts. Discover how the law struggles mightily with situations in which one or both parties are wrong about some basic assumption that animates their exchange. Also, learn about other rules that can make deals voidable, including mental incapacity and infancy.
Duration: 33 min

08: Third Parties in Contract Law

Contracts can affect dozens—even thousands—of third parties to whom you or your client will be obligated. Using court cases from 1859 and 1918, trace the history of third-party beneficiaries and examine the related issue of assignment and delegation: when a party to a contract can transfer their rights or duties to someone else.
Duration: 34 min

09: When a Contract Needs to Be in Writing

The relationship between contract and writing is much more complex than you might think. First, look at the statute of frauds: a 1677 rule nullifying certain kinds of agreements if they’re not in writing. Then, examine the powerful doctrine of the parol evidence rule, which privileges the contractual text over what the parties might have intended.
Duration: 33 min

10: Contract Interpretation and Implied Terms

What should courts do when parties disagree about what their agreement means? What can we learn about this from the great case Raffles v. Wichelhaus? What is so controversial about how judges read and interpret insurance policies? How do implied terms prohibit parties from abusing their power under a contract?
Duration: 35 min

11: Building Contracts and Breaching Them

Survey the basic building blocks of contracts and the rules for assessing when a contract is breached. These include express conditions (such as force majeure), which say that parties don’t have to perform if certain events occur or don’t occur, and anticipatory repudiation, or performing terribly and not correcting the problem.
Duration: 32 min

12: Remedies for Breach of Contract

The default remedy for a breach of contract is money damages—but sometimes calculating expectation damages can be complicated. And sometimes, plaintiffs fall back on alternative paths to recovery, known as reliance damages (which reimburse plaintiffs for expenses the defendant’s breach renders worthless). Explore these and other remedies in this final lecture.
Duration: 36 min