ABSTRACT
The proper interpretation of offers and acceptances has, despite their undisputable role in the formation of contracts, received relatively little theoretical and comparative analysis in recent years. The notorious legal question of when a contract is considered to have been formed is a fundamental concept in all legal systems, yet its nature remains poorly understood and controversial. Moreover, recent doctrinal and jurisprudential developments in English, French, US, German, and Canadian law of contracts call for further systematic assessment of this fascinating topic. This paper seeks to provide a systematic comparative evaluation of the disparate doctrines governing offer and acceptance and the consequential formation of contracts in English, US, German, French, and Canadian law of contracts. While employing well-defined normative criteria of justice and wealth-maximization, it identifies the aspects of suboptimal reliance, rent-seeking, cost-avoidance, and opportunistic revocations and provides a set of economically inspired arguments for justification of the mailbox rule. The paper is an attempt to determine how much new light the comparative analysis of law can shed on the puzzling issues of offer and acceptance so as to help clarify them.
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Mitja Kovac, The Rise of the Mailbox Rule and Formation of Contracts in English, US and Canadian Law, Liverpool Law Review (2022), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10991-022-09301-x. Published 2 July.
First posted 2022-07-06 09:00:01
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