Contractual Duties: Performance, Breach, Termination and Remedies 2nd ed

Contractual Duties: Performance, Breach, Termination and Remedies provides guidance from four leading contract academics on the duties at play in a contract that is in dispute: its performance, breach, termination and the remedies available.

Main features:-

• Part 1 covers rescission: firstly its principles and process are explained.
• Explains each of the possible grounds for rescission, including misrepresentation, mistake and non-disclosure; duress, undue pressure and influence; impaired capacity, unconscionable conduct and breaches of fiduciary duty.
• Details the bars to rescission, explaining what damages might be due in lieu of rescission.
• Outlines the consequences of rescission, including compensation, apportionment of loss and concurrent claims.
• Part 2 introduces the different types of breach and the terminology that governs them, and explains strict and non-strict obligations.
• It sets out and analyses concepts such as renunciation, anticipatory breach, and repudiation by actual breach.
• Discusses the common law right to terminate for breach of condition, particularly with regard to time stipulations.
• Explains innominate or intermediate terms, deriving from the Hongkong Fir case, and its reception in Australia and New Zealand.
• Analyses the nature and process of termination for breach, including international principles, and explains the ‘entire obligation’ rule.
• Part 3 deals with discharge by impossibility, illegality or frustration.
• Part 4 discusses remedies available, beginning with the right to sue for a debt and the limits to such an action.
• Covers damages for breach of contract, laying out the measures of award.
• Explains financial loss, covering the various ways of expressing the loss, via concepts such as expectation, reliance, consequential damage, ‘cost of cure’ and balance sheet calculation, and questions of timing.
• Analyses the two limbs of the Hadley v Baxendale principle and their consequences.
• Covers other types of damages including agreed damage and gain-based awards.
• Discusses specific relief, focusing on the grant of specific performance and injunctions.
• Focuses on English contract law, but also shows how other jurisdictions have different approaches, and suggesting new ideas drawn from the US, Australia and civil law systems.

• Substantial case law updates across all four key areas of the book since the first edition was written in 2011
• Includes analysis of the effect of recent legislation on contractual duties, i.e. the Consumer Rights Act 2014