Event Quest Titles: a legal analysis
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.
