Problems in Contract Law: Cases and Materials, Concise, First Edition

BOOKMARK

Authors

Charles L. Knapp
Nathan M. Crystal
Harry G. Prince
Danielle K. Hart
Joshua M. Silverstein

Series / Aspen Casebook Series

BOOKMARK

Book length

880 pages

Publication Date

2025-02-01

Edition

First Edition

Description

Table of contents

Preface

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Problems in Contract Law: Cases and Materials, Concise Edition, is a comprehensive, modern, and accessible casebook specifically designed for use in three- and four-credit, one-semester Contracts courses. Following the same organization and scope of coverage of the authors’ successful unabridged casebook, this Concise Edition streamlines coverage of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) and revises cases and notes to sharpen the focus on the core principles of contract law so that professors can cover all of the material in one semester.

Well-known for approaching contract law and theory from multiple perspectives and using a variety of contractual settings, the text includes cases with notes and explanatory text, additional commentary, essay and short-answer problems, and multiple-choice review questions for each chapter. The cases selected are a balance of traditional and contemporary that reflect the development and complexity of contract law. Explanatory notes and text place the classic and newer decisions in their larger legal context. Questions and problems provide opportunities to practice core legal skills and encourage students to explore the relationship of theory and practice. Adaptable for instructors with different pedagogical philosophies, Problems in Contract Law, Concise Edition can easily be used in teaching by traditional case analysis, through problem-based instruction, or using theoretical inquiry.

Professors and students will benefit from:

● The authors’ emphasis on making the material accessible for both students taking and professors teaching the course--rejecting a hide-the-ball approach.
● The continued appeal to professors with various teaching methodologies: traditional, problem-oriented, theoretical, and practical.
● The comprehensive nature of the contents which allows professors the flexibility to teach their students the basics or conduct a more in-depth analysis of a given topic.
● The continued mixture of classic and contemporary cases.
● Review questions at the end of each chapter that are primarily designed for students to perform self-assessments of their grasp of the material. Answers with explanations are included in an appendix within the book.

Table of Contents

Summary of Contents

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1
An Introduction to the Study of Contract Law

CHAPTER 2
The Basis of Contractual Obligation:
Mutual Assent and Consideration

CHAPTER 3
Liability in the Absence of Bargained- for Exchange:
Reliance on Gratuitous Promises, Unaccepted Offers,
and the Principle of Restitution

CHAPTER 4
The Statute of Frauds

CHAPTER 5
Express Terms of the Agreement:
Principles of Interpretation and the Parol Evidence Rule

CHAPTER 6
Supplementing the Agreement:
Implied Terms, the Obligation of Good Faith, and Warranties

CHAPTER 7
Avoiding Enforcement:
Incapacity, Bargaining Misconduct, Unconscionability,
and Public Policy

CHAPTER 8
Justification for Nonperformance:
Mistake, Changed Circumstances, and Contractual Modifications

CHAPTER 9
Consequences of Nonperformance:
Express Conditions, Material Breach, and Anticipatory Repudiation

CHAPTER 10
Expectation Damages:
Principles and Limitations

CHAPTER 11
Alternatives to Expectation Damages:
Reliance and Restitutionary Damages, Specific
Performance, and Agreed Remedies

CHAPTER 12
Rights and Duties of Third Parties

Appendix: Answers to Review Questions
Table of Cases
Table of Uniform Commercial Code Provisions (UCC)
Table of Provisions from Restatement (Second) of Contracts
Table of Provisions from Restatement (First) of Contracts
Table of Provisions from Other Restatements
Table of Other Acts, Codes, and Rules
Table of Secondary Authorities
Index

Preface

Professor Materials

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About the authors

Charles L. Knapp

Professor Emeritus

University of California, Hastings

Charles L. Knapp is the Emeritus Joseph W. Cotchett Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, in San Francisco. He joined the Hastings Faculty in 1998, coming to San Francisco from New York University School of Law, where he was the first Max E. Greenberg Professor of Contract Law, a title which he continues to hold as emeritus.

Professor Knapp joined the N.Y.U. Law School faculty in 1964, and served as its Associate Dean from 1977-1982. He has also taught at the University of Arizona School of Law, Brooklyn Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Copenhagen. He holds a B.A. degree from Denison University, a J.D. from N.Y.U., and studied at the University of Sydney on a Rotary International Fellowship.

Before embarking on his teaching career at N.Y.U., he was an associate attorney with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, in New York City. In addition to his work on Problems in Contract Law and his published articles on contract law and other topics, Professor Knapp was the original editor-in-chief of Commercial Damages (Matthew Bender 1986) and of its companion publication, Commercial Damages Reporter.

His recent articles include Cases and Controversies: Some Things to do with Contracts Cases, 88 Wash. L. Rev. 1357 (2013), and Is There a “Duty to Read”?, 66 Hastings L.J. 1083 (2015).

Nathan M. Crystal

Professor

University of South Carolina

Nathan Crystal holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton School), Emory Law School (where he was editor-in-chief of the law review), and Harvard Law School. He is Distinguished Class of 1969 Professor of Professional Responsibility and Contract Law Emeritus at the University of South Carolina School of Law and Adjunct Professor of Professional Responsibility at NYU Law School, where he has taught for eight years. Professor Crystal is the author or coauthor of four books, three on legal ethics and one on contract law:

PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY – PROBLEMS OF PRACTICE AND THE PROFESSION (Aspen Publishing Law & Business 7th ed. 2020 with Grace M. Giesel)
AN INTRODUCTION TO PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY (Aspen Publishing Law & Business 1998)
ANNOTATED SOUTH CAROLINA RULES OF PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT (S.C. Bar 2020 ed.)
PROBLEMS IN CONTRACT LAW: CASES AND MATERIALS (with Charles Knapp, Harry G. Prince, Joshua M. Silverstein, and Danielle K. Hart, 10th ed. 2022)

In addition to his books, Professor Crystal has published numerous articles in scholarly journals, including the Akron Law Review, Charleston Law Review, Fordham Law Review, Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Global Jurist, Illinois Law Review, International Litigation, Kansas Law Review, Kentucky Law Journal, Mercer Law Review, Mississippi College Law Review, Notre Dame Journal of Law Ethics and Public Policy, North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulation, NYU Annual Survey of American Law, Opinio Juris in Comparitone, Penn State Law Review, Saint Mary’s Law Journal, Saint Louis Law Journal, South Carolina Law Review, South Carolina Journal of International Law & Business, Wake Forest Law Review, and Washington Law Review. For more than fifteen years, he has authored a bimonthly column, "Ethics Watch,” for the South Carolina Lawyer.

Professor Crystal lectures frequently on matters of professional ethics to national, regional, and local organizations, including the American Bar Association, the United States Justice Department, and the Practicing Law Institute. He has held visiting appointments and lectureships at Arkansas (Little Rock), Charleston School of Law, Florida State, Hastings, Indiana (Indianapolis), Luiss (Rome), Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna (Pisa), Tanjin (China), Suffolk, and Sydney (Parsons Visiting Scholar).

As a practicing lawyer, Mr. Crystal is the managing partner of Crystal & Giannoni-Crystal, LLC with offices in Atlanta; Charleston, SC; New York City; and Washington, DC. The firm focuses in practice on professional ethics, international business, and data privacy. Professor Crystal has served as an expert witness, ethics advisor, disciplinary defense counsel, and internal investigator in hundreds of cases involving lawyers and law firms in all major areas of practice. He has been selected by his peers for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America© since 2015 in the fields of Ethics and Professional Responsibility Law.

Harry G. Prince

Professor

University of California, Hastings

Harry G. Prince is Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, where he taught from 1985 until his retirement from full-time teaching in 2017. His primary teaching areas were Contract Law and the Uniform Commercial Code. He also taught courses in Public International Law, Consumer Protection Law, and Race and the Law.

He served as the Associate Academic Dean at Hastings from 1991 to 1993 and 2007 to 2009. Professor Prince has been very active in the legal education community. He served as Deputy Director of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) from January 1999 to August 2001, and he was chair of the AALS Membership Review Committee from 1996 to 1997.

As a member of the National Conference of Bar Examiners Drafting Committee for Contracts from 1996 to 2002, he helped write contract law questions for the Multistate Bar Examination. Professor Prince also served as a member of the American Bar Association (ABA) Committee on Accreditation from 2005 to 2007, and he regularly participated on ABA site evaluation teams as part of the accreditation process. He is a member of the American Law Institute.

Professor Prince began his law teaching career at the University of Illinois in 1982, and he has also taught at George Washington University, the University of California at Berkeley, Howard University, and Golden Gate University. Professor Prince graduated from Temple University in 1977 and received his J.D. from New York University in 1980. He was a law clerk for U.S. District Court Judge Lee R. West in the Western District of Oklahoma from 1980 to 1981, before beginning practice as an attorney-adviser with the U.S. State Department Office of the Legal Adviser in 1981.

Danielle Kie Hart

Professor

Southwestern Law School

Danielle Kie Hart is a Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles where she teaches Contracts I & II, Sales, Secured Transactions, Law & Social Change, and Critical Race Theory. Professor Hart is a past member of the Executive Committee and the past chair of the Association of American Law School’s Section on Gender and Identity Issues and the AALS’s Section on Contracts. She currently serves on the Boards of Directors of ClassCrits and the Commercial Law Amicus Initiative and is a member of the Strategic Planning Committee for the Collective of Political Economy and Law. Professor Hart’s legal scholarship has covered a wide range of topics, such as access to justice, procedural reform, and civil rights, including class privilege, racial inequality, and same-sex marriage. For the last fifteen years, her work has focused on contract law, specifically, its politics, distributive effects and social consequences. Her articles have appeared in such publications as the Texas A&M Law Review, St. John’s Law Review, the iNevada Law Journali, the iWashington University Journal of Law & Policyi, iThe Theory and Practice of Legislationi, iLoyola of Los Angeles Law Reviewi, the iGeorge Mason University Civil Rights Law Journal,i iUniversity of Hawaii Law Review, iand the iLoyola University Chicago Law Journali. Professor Hart received her B.A. degrees (Economics and History with honors in History) from Whitman College, her J.D. degree from the William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawaii at Manoa, and her LL.M. from Harvard Law School.

Joshua M. Silverstein

Professor

University of Arkansas at Little Rock, William H. Bowen School of Law

Joshua M. Silverstein is a professor of law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, William H. Bowen School of Law, where he has taught since 2004. He teaches Contracts, Secured Transactions, and Jurisprudence (which covers both legal philosophy and constitutional theory).

Professor Silverstein has earned multiple teaching honors. Most significantly, in 2022, he won the Bailey Teaching Award, which is the Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching for all of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Professor Silverstein has also twice received his law school’s Faculty Excellence Award for Teaching—in 2010 and 2022. He won the Bowen law school’s We HEART Faculty Award in 2021, the only year the award was given. The We HEART prize was voted on by the student body at the law school.

Professor Silverstein’s scholarship focuses on contracts, bankruptcy, and grading in legal education. His publications have received national attention from other scholars, courts, and the media.

Professor Silverstein’s university and public service includes:

Spearheading major curricular reforms at his law school,
Serving in multiple leadership roles both at the law school and within the broader university,
Performing hundreds of hours of pro bono legal services,
Working on numerous bills and proposed constitutional amendments pending before the Arkansas state legislature, and
Commenting for local and national media nearly three hundred times as an expert on bankruptcy law, constitutional law, civil procedure, contracts, and other legal topics.

Professor Silverstein graduated summa cum laude from Hamilton College with a B.A., where he double-majored in Philosophy and Government, and magna cum laude from the New York University School of Law, where he was also named to the Order of the Coif. After graduation, Professor Silverstein was a law clerk to the Honorable Suzanne B. Conlon, United States District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois. He then served as a litigation associate at two Chicago law firms—Mayer Brown and Freeborn & Peters—where he practiced primarily in the fields of products liability, bankruptcy, antitrust, business torts, and contracts.

Product Information

Edition

First Edition

Publication date

2025-02-01

2025

Pages

880

Connected eBook with Study Center + Hardcover

9798889063339

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9798889063353

Subject

Contract Law

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