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2 Offer and acceptance

A contract is an agreement between two parties imposing rights and
obligations which may be enforced by law. The courts need some kind of
evidence of this agreement, so they look, through the eyes of a reasonable
person, for external evidence of it. To help identify evidence of agreement,
it is conventionally analysed into two aspects: offer and acceptance.

Offer

An offer can be defined as follows:

An expression of willingness to contract on certain terms, made with

the intention that it shall become binding as soon as it is accepted

by the person to whom it is addressed.

Offers can be one of two types:

• Specific – made to one person or group of people. Then only that
  particular person or group of people can accept.


• General – made to ‘the whole world’ (or people generally), particularly
  seen in the cases of rewards and other public advertisements.

The following is probably one of the best known cases in contract law, and
it involves a general offer, made to the ‘whole world’.

offer acceptance contract

Figure 2.1