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Event Quest Titles: a legal analysis
DinoHop05
Member Posts: 113 ★★★
Do you always read the monthly event quest titles and wonder what their theme is?
Me neither, I think they're dumb and a waste of time. BUT this month they caught my eye! They are:
* Offer
* Acceptance
* Awareness
* Consideration
* Capacity
* Legality
Yeah yeah, they make no sense, right? WRONG. They're six of my favorite things. For this deep dive into something no one else but me cares about, I'll take off my myriad other hats to wear that of: *attorney*. These six things are **the essential elements of a contract.** Basically if you want a court to enforce an agreement you made, you better be able to show all six of these things are present (or conversely if you want to wiggle out of an agreement, show that one of these is deficient). Let's chat about each one:
1. **Offer** - pretty straightforward, a party needs to make the terms of the potential agreement known. You can't walk up to a car dealer and say, "yes I'll buy a Range Rover for $30!" They didn't offer that, so no contract. There needs to be a set of duties and responsibilities each party has.
2. **Acceptance** - also straightforward, the other party needs to actually affirm that they're going to assume the offer's duties and responsibilities. Guy on the street waving a sign about discount furniture can't ship said furniture to your house if you walk by him silently. Only after you say, "yes I'll buy your broken couch" does his offer to sell it becomes accepted.
3. **Awareness** - now we're diving into the legalese. There's only a contract when both parties know they're entering into an agreement. This is known as the "meeting of the minds." The classic example is the agreement for party A to sell "The Voyager" to party B. If party B thinks "The Voyager" is a 300 foot yacht, while party A thinks "The Voyager" is a replica Star Trek model, there wasn't awareness of what the parties were actually agreeing to do.
4. **Consideration** - a contract becomes enforceable only if both sides exchange value. A gift isn't a contract, because both sides aren't taking some duty/responsibility. You must have a bargained-for exchange. Consideration can be small, i.e. you can sell a building for a dollar. But it can't be nothing.
5. **Capacity** - each party must have the ability to come to an agreement. You can't contract with a person who's braindead (literally, I don't mean that alliancemate who took your AW fight against Sentinel who died 4 times while you sat there with Vox I'M NOT MAD I JUST WANT TO UNDERSTAND). A person can't enter a contract in English if they only speak Spanish. As you might guess, there are often fixes to this element, such as a guardian for a minor or a translator for someone speaking another language.
6. **Legality** - we're done with the complex terms and back to simple. Contracts need to follow the law to be enforceable, meaning courts won't uphold a contract to sell drugs or hire a hitman. Similarly they won't uphold an agreement made under duress or undue influence. This is often called the "public policy" argument, and it's the last line of attack if someone wants to claim the agreement isn't valid.
There you go! All the elements you need to make a binding contract hold up in court, or a nice arsenal of options if you want to avoid the stupid deal you made previously. When I was in law school, contracts was easily my favorite class, so I enjoyed this nice little trip into the recesses of my mind. Contract law is great man.
Me neither, I think they're dumb and a waste of time. BUT this month they caught my eye! They are:
* Offer
* Acceptance
* Awareness
* Consideration
* Capacity
* Legality
Yeah yeah, they make no sense, right? WRONG. They're six of my favorite things. For this deep dive into something no one else but me cares about, I'll take off my myriad other hats to wear that of: *attorney*. These six things are **the essential elements of a contract.** Basically if you want a court to enforce an agreement you made, you better be able to show all six of these things are present (or conversely if you want to wiggle out of an agreement, show that one of these is deficient). Let's chat about each one:
1. **Offer** - pretty straightforward, a party needs to make the terms of the potential agreement known. You can't walk up to a car dealer and say, "yes I'll buy a Range Rover for $30!" They didn't offer that, so no contract. There needs to be a set of duties and responsibilities each party has.
2. **Acceptance** - also straightforward, the other party needs to actually affirm that they're going to assume the offer's duties and responsibilities. Guy on the street waving a sign about discount furniture can't ship said furniture to your house if you walk by him silently. Only after you say, "yes I'll buy your broken couch" does his offer to sell it becomes accepted.
3. **Awareness** - now we're diving into the legalese. There's only a contract when both parties know they're entering into an agreement. This is known as the "meeting of the minds." The classic example is the agreement for party A to sell "The Voyager" to party B. If party B thinks "The Voyager" is a 300 foot yacht, while party A thinks "The Voyager" is a replica Star Trek model, there wasn't awareness of what the parties were actually agreeing to do.
4. **Consideration** - a contract becomes enforceable only if both sides exchange value. A gift isn't a contract, because both sides aren't taking some duty/responsibility. You must have a bargained-for exchange. Consideration can be small, i.e. you can sell a building for a dollar. But it can't be nothing.
5. **Capacity** - each party must have the ability to come to an agreement. You can't contract with a person who's braindead (literally, I don't mean that alliancemate who took your AW fight against Sentinel who died 4 times while you sat there with Vox I'M NOT MAD I JUST WANT TO UNDERSTAND). A person can't enter a contract in English if they only speak Spanish. As you might guess, there are often fixes to this element, such as a guardian for a minor or a translator for someone speaking another language.
6. **Legality** - we're done with the complex terms and back to simple. Contracts need to follow the law to be enforceable, meaning courts won't uphold a contract to sell drugs or hire a hitman. Similarly they won't uphold an agreement made under duress or undue influence. This is often called the "public policy" argument, and it's the last line of attack if someone wants to claim the agreement isn't valid.
There you go! All the elements you need to make a binding contract hold up in court, or a nice arsenal of options if you want to avoid the stupid deal you made previously. When I was in law school, contracts was easily my favorite class, so I enjoyed this nice little trip into the recesses of my mind. Contract law is great man.
15
Comments
I’m only ever any good with the ones that appear to be song names!
If I am willing to sell my house for "free" to person B and B is willing to buy my house for "free" and both are well aware of the deal, and the deal does not violate any law, then it is still a contract right? So why there must be a consideration?
PS just because there isn't a contract doesn't mean you're SOL. There are other legal principles you may be able to use, such as promissory estoppel ("I relied on you making a specific promise, so the Court should still enforce the agreement even though there's no legal contract"). That's beyond the scope of this, but rest assured, common law in most countries provides ways to receive "justice" if you're wronged in a deal gone sideways, even when a contract doesn't exist.
We could pass a law tomorrow eliminating the need for consideration, but imagine the chaos that could ensue. I promise to buy you lunch next time we meet then I don’t, have I broken a legal contract? I promise my kids they get the house when I die then change my mind and sell it, is that legal?
We want to legally protect situations where both sides actively participate in the deal the contract describes, so both sides need to be protected. When one side is contributing and the other side isn’t, the legal view is there’s nothing to protect. One side is just being a nice guy, and we’re not going to legally punish him if he changes his mind.
To sue someone, you need to generally state (and prove) four things:
1. The other guy had some legal obligation to you
2. They failed.
3. This caused you some problems
4. Those problems ended up costing you something.
The legal terms are Duty, Breach, Causation, and Damages.. Consideration is analogous to Damages. In a contract both sides must put up something of value or it isn’t valid. When you sue, you must state that you actually lost something of value or the claim isn’t valid.
There are exceptions and technicalities, but in general (civil) courts are in the business of fixing problems they can actually step in and fix, and most of them revolve around people losing things of value and asking the courts to remedy that loss. In one sense, a contract is a way to create a new legal obligation besides the normal ones the law usually creates (like the don’t make defective products one, the don’t set people’s house on fire one, etc). Damages are what makes the breaking of a legal obligation something the legal system should step in on to address. Consideration is what creates a new legal obligation in the first place.
We saw him in 2 streams with Jax.
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