Law Of Contract
A contract is an agreement between to or more people that can be enforceable legally. Therefore, a contract is legally binding as well as essentially commercial. Basically, the intention of a contract is to formalize a given promise or agreement between several parties with regard to an issue at hand. However, for a contact to be enforceable, there are several elements which must be met. In this text, I recount a dispute between a friend and another individual several months ago. This dispute basically arose as a contractual squabble between the parties and in this text; I recount the facts of the scenario, the nature of risk, the issue as well as my position and reasoning for the same.
The scenario
A friend of mine, David, received a text message in his cell phone from Grace with whom they attended the same college. In the Text message, Grace was offering her house for sale to David for a given amount of cash. Grace made it clear in the text that if this was an offer valid until the following week on Tuesday 9am. However, David remembered the issue on Tuesday morning after receiving a call from Leah, Grace’s friend who informed David in the course of their conversation on other issues that the house had already been offered for sale to another person. David hurriedly consulted with his wife, sent a text message to Grace accepting the offer at about 8am on the same Tuesday morning. Thereafter, David got a text message from Grace informing him that the House was already sold to another person who turned out to be Grace’s former boyfriend.
According to Richards (2009), for a contract to be valid, there must be a person who makes the offer and the other who accepts the offer. Acceptance of the offer in this case is critical. In this scenario, Grace made the offer to sell the house to David who accepted the offer.However, an offeror can at any time revoke a contract that states its validity period, otherwise referred to as a firm offer. However, the time of revocation is important. Revocation must be made before the offeree accepts the offer from the offeror (Collins 2003). In the same breath, the offeror is not bound in any way by the validity period of the offer.
According to Stone (2005), as far as the revocation of an offer is concerned, the offeree must receive a communication of the revocation before his acceptance. Here, the offer is deemed to be incomplete. In the case of David and Grace, the communication of the revocation was made by another party i.e. Leah almost by accident as their initial conversation was not inclined towards the sale of the said house. It is however important to note that in the case of revocation, it need not be communicated by the offeror. With that in mind therefore, Grace was free to rescind the offer as there was no contact between them as yet. Additionally, all the rules as far as revocation of an offer is concerned were in place. This was the same position held in a similar case of Dickinson V. Dodds (1876).
Conclusion
In the above scenario, it can be argued that there was no contract as yet between David and Grace and with that in mind; neither party was bound unless there was an agreement to the contrary between the two parties. Otherwise, the revocation of the offer by Grace was quite in order.
References
Collins, H. (2003). The law of contract. CambridgeUniversity Press
Richards, P. (2009). Law of Contract. Pearson Longman
Stone, R. (2005). Contract Law Q&A 2005-2006 6/e. Routledge
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