Contract law seeks to protect parties to an agreement not only by requiring formalities but in many other ways as well. Thus rules respecting deceit, fraud, and undue influence are designed to ensure that contractual obligations are assumed freely and without one party misleading the other. Other rules regulate the modification of ongoing contractual relations with a view to preventing a party with considerable bargaining power from unfairly imposing changes in the contract.
The law also allows contractual relations to be adjusted when they have been thrown out of balance by unforeseen circumstances. The task of adjustment is relatively easy in cases in which both parties made a mistake or in which one party laboured under a mistaken assumption that was, or plainly should have been, known to the other. The problem of mistake becomes more intractable when the error is chargeable to only one party. The solutions reached for such situations are complex and defy general statement.
Catastrophic events such as inflation, political upheaval, or natural disasters may upset the economy of a contract. In the case of natural catastrophes, relief is frequently available under theories of force majeure (action by a superior or irresistible force) and âact of Godâ (act of nature that is unforeseeable and unpreventable by human intervention). When the unsettling circumstances are economic in their nature, as with severe inflation or deflation, a solution is difficult to find. A party who benefits from inflation in one contractual or economic relation may suffer from it in another. A general readjustment in contracts would be enormously complicated and time-consuming and would interject an undesirable element of uncertainty into economic and business activity. Only under exceptional circumstancesâand usually in the form of special legislationâare contractual relations adjusted for the effects of severe economic dislocations.
Another branch of contract law deals with the sanctions that are made available to a contracting party when the other party fails to perform its contractual obligations. When these sanctions take the form of money damagesâas they usually do in practice, even though some civil-law systems have a theoretical preference for specific reliefâthe system must decide whether plaintiffs are to be put in the same position economically that they would have been in had the contract been performed (expectancy damages) or simply reimbursed for the actual losses, if any, flowing from their reliance on the contract (reliance damages). Reliance damages can, of course, be very large. A subcontractor who fails to deliver parts required for the construction of an ocean liner (or delivers faulty parts) may be responsible for heavy reliance damages resulting from delay in the work or actual damage to the vessel. Legal systems utilize various techniques to limit both reliance and expectancy damages when otherwise they would be unreasonably large.
If a person has agreed to buy an article from a merchant, a refusal to take delivery will not ordinarily produce substantial reliance damages. Delivery costs will have been incurred, but the merchant will presumably not have lost sales elsewhere. In such circumstances, the merchant will seek to recover not delivery costs but lost profitâthe expectancy damages. The law allows relief on the basis that the expectancy created by an enforceable promise has a current economic value, measured by the economic gain that the party would derive if the particular agreement were performed.
In some circumstances, performance is not measurable in terms of market valueâas, for example, when one relative has agreed to sell to another a family painting of sentimental value but of little intrinsic worth. Many legal systems in such a case require specific performance (that is, compliance with the precise terms agreed upon in the contract). The availability of specific relief varies among contemporary legal systems, for reasons that seem more historical and doctrinal than practical.
