| Business 207 – Legal Responsibilities of Business – Perello |
Contracts touch everything, both personal and business. They are how we create mutual, enforceable, obligations. The enforceability is the key, for it allows us to rely -- meaning act on the presumption another will perform as promised -- and therefore to plan ahead. Such planning is crucial to the survival of a complex society and economy.
In rough outline, this lecture will look into what a contract does, how it is created (formation), and how it is (or should be) written. The next three lectures will examine the methods of getting out of a contract and the ramifications of performing or failing to perform a contract. The last lecture in the series will be a specific examination of Landlord-Tenant and Employment Contracts.
A special note on studying this topic: In addition to being the most important topic of the quarter, its also is the most complicated: a huge volume of material, massive glossary, and some difficult concepts. I cannot overemphasize the necessity of getting an idea of the scope of the topic. I recommend you lightly read through all the chapters once; by "lightly" I don't mean skim, but don't try to memorize everything. Next, do some writing: organize your approach, get an idea of the broad structure. Use this diagram (a version of my contracts review outline from law school) as one, but only one, way to do so: the large arrows describe the lifecycle of a contract; the smaller arrows (most omitted for clarity) show relationships between subtopics. You are welcome to use or discard it as you see fit; however, you may find, as I did, that having a process for approaching contracts questions greatly aids keeping all the information in context.
Materials: Read Miller & Jentz Chapter 7, the first half (Agreement) of Chapter 8, and Chapter 13. Also read this sample agreement, paying particular attention to the boilerplate (miscellaneous) clauses. These are the lecture slides and this is the downloadable file of the lecture, available during and after the TTh 12-2 class meeting.
Quizzes:
Quiz 16 will be available from 1600 on 27 October until 1400 on 28 October. It covers only the readings & slides for this lecture.
Quiz 17 will be available from 0800 on 30 October until 1800 on 1 November. This will cover all the material from this lecture.