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Contracts: Cases and Doctrine, Eighth Edition

Authors
  • Randy E. Barnett
  • Nathan B. Oman
Series / Aspen Casebook Series
Teaching Materials
NO
Description
Table of contents
Preface

Buy a new version of this textbook and receive access to the Connected eBook with Study Center on Casebook Connect, including lifetime access to the online ebook with highlight, annotation, and search capabilities. Access also includes practice questions, an outline tool, and other helpful resources. Connected eBooks provide what you need most to be successful in your law school classes.

Contracts: Cases and Doctrine features a mix of lightly-edited classic and contemporary cases that stress current contract doctrine along with the essential lawyering skill of case analysis—how to sift through the facts of the case to discern the prevailing rules and theory. Randy Barnett and Nate Oman’s innovative text introduces each case and provides the historical background of the iconic cases that make the study of contract law engaging. Study Guide questions help students identify salient issues as they read each case. Judicial biographies of each judge provide additional context.

The 8th Edition has been streamlined and edited to delete materials that are rarely covered in a 1L class. This edition includes new cases that have been chosen for their topicality, facts, or pedagogical usefulness. Areas covered include so-called “smart contracts” and the relationship between restitution and contract. As always, the authors focus on cases with facts that will be easier to teach. New cases in this edition include litigation between Ukraine and Russia over Russia’s invasion of its neighbor, a plea bargaining deal gone wrong, what happens when an employee signs a boilerplate arbitration contract “No Rejected,” and a dispute over whether spiders are insects.

New to the 8th Edition:
In order to keep the size of the book manageable, the authors have simplified its structure by condensing some of the more theoretical material on enforceability. The chapters on Principles of Enforceability and Intention to be Legally Bound have been deleted entirely, and highly truncated portions of the materials from these chapters have been added to the chapters on The Doctrine of Consideration and The Doctrine of Promissory Estoppel.

New cases include:
In re IBP Inc. Shareholders Litigation (specific performance of a merger agreement involving personal services)
Bjorkman v. Arctic Cat, Inc. (modern application of the rule in Dickinson v. Dodds)
Ragland v. IEC US Holdings, Inc. (a new employee signed a boilerplate arbitration contract “No Rejected”)
Rios v. State of Maryland (confused bargaining over a plea bargaining agreement)
Robinson v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. (What is a spider? An example of neo-textualist interpretation)
Law Debenture Trust Corp. Plc. v. Ukraine (litigation between two countries – Russia and Ukraine – in the courts of a third country, England)
Martinez-Gonzalez v. Elkhorn Packing Co. LLC (duress in an employment contract involving a migrant worker)

Professors and student will benefit from:
• Case-based approach gives students ample doctrinal materials to sift through for facts and analyze for prevailing rules and theory.
• Cases are lightly edited, or presented as whole as possible, to give first-year students the opportunity to develop case-analysis skills.
• Restatement and UCC sections are integrated to encourage students to consult them as they read the cases.
• Iconic and contemporary cases are combined to show how the classic cases are still relevant.
• Each chapter begins with a brief, accessible textual introduction.
• Study Guide questions before each case help focus student attention on salient issues.
• Flexible organization begins with Remedies, but chapters can be taught in any order.

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Table of Contents
Summary of Contents

Contents 
Preface
Acknowledgments 


PART I ENFORCING PRIVATE AGREEMENTS
Chapter 1. Introduction to Contract Law 
Chapter 2. Damages for Breach of Contract 
Chapter 3. Other Remedies and Causes of Action 

PART II MUTUAL ASSENT 
Chapter 4. Reaching an Agreement 
Chapter 5. Discerning the Agreement 
Chapter 6. Written Manifestations of Assent
Chapter 7. Multiparty Transactions 

PART III ENFORCEABILITY
Chapter 8. The Doctrine of Consideration 
Chapter 9. Agreements Enforced Without Consideration 

PART IV PERFORMANCE AND BREACH 
Chapter 10. Performance 
Chapter 11. Conditions
Chapter 12. Breach

PART V DEFENSES TO CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATION 
Chapter 13. Lack of Contractual Capacity 
Chapter 14. Assent Improperly Obtained and Assent to Improper Terms 
Chapter 15. Failure of a Basic Assumption

Table of Judges 
Table of Cases
Table of Statutes 
Index
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Professor Materials
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About the authors
Randy E. Barnett
Georgetown University

Randy E. Barnett is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches constitutional law and contracts, and is Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, he tried many felony cases as a prosecutor in the Cook County States’ Attorney’s Office in Chicago. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies, Professor Barnett has been a visiting professor at Penn, Northwestern, and Harvard Law School. In 2004, he argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzalez v. Raich before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2012, he was one of the lawyers representing the National Federation of Independent Business in its constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act. Professor Barnett’s publications include eleven books, more than one hundred articles and reviews, as well as numerous op-eds. New editions of his books, Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (Princeton) and The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (Oxford) will be released later this year, as will his coauthored book, A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case (Palgrave).

Nathan B. Oman
William & Mary Law School

Nathan Oman joined the faculty at William & Mary Law School in 2006. He earned his J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where he served on the Articles Committee of the Harvard Law Review and as an editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He graduated from Brigham Young University, where he was a Benson Scholar, and, prior to law school, worked on the staff of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Morris Shepard Arnold of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and worked as a litigation associate in the Washington, DC office of Sidley Austin, LLP.

Areas of Specialization: Contract Law; Economic Analysis of Law; Jurisprudence; Law and Religion; Legal History.

Product Information
Edition
Eighth Edition
Publication date
2024-11-19
Copyright Year
2025
Pages
1152
Connected eBook with Study Center + Hardcover
9798892074100
Connected eBook with Study Center (Digital Only)
9798892074117
Subject
Contract Law
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