Renting a home, buying a ticket, downloading an app--humans enter into contracts constantly, often with little consciousness of the legal implications. We typically become alert to the consequences only when a problem arises. Contracting can increase our happiness by enabling us to do things that we would be otherwise unable to do, but heartbreak follows when things go wrong. This casebook, which can be used as a primary text for a first-year law school contracts course, covers a wide spectrum of quandaries that emerge in contract law, from problems of overreach and interpretation to enforcement and fraud. Taken together, these cases offer an exploration of contract pathology and introduce students to concepts that are essential to understanding the vast subject of Anglo-American contract law.

This book is part of the Open Casebook series from Harvard Law School Library and the MIT Press.

• Primary text for a first-year law school contracts course
• Developed for use at Harvard Law School by a leading scholar in contract law
• Diverse cases show differing approaches to a range of problems within contracting
• Classroom tested