Part 2
The contents of a contract
Is this what I agreed?
We have seen in Part 1 of this book that to form a binding contract, the
essential requirement is that the parties are like-minded over the basis of
their contract. This includes the detailed terms which make up the
contract.
For example, if a person visits a store and agrees to buy a carpet, both
the seller and the buyer may be quite clear on which carpet is required,
and how much is to be paid, but they may have quite different expectations
over the delivery date. In this case it would be important to have a
contract to refer to, in order to determine exactly what was decided. Of
course, it would only be fair to include such terms if they were put in at
or before the point of agreement. It would be wrong for one party to be
able to slip in a date of delivery afterwards which was unacceptable to the
other. So we say that terms must be incorporated into a contract in a fair
way.
Sometimes a consumer (an ordinary person, buying from a person in
business) will not think about a term which could be quite important at a
later stage, and therefore be at a disadvantage when dealing with a
business.To help prevent this, Parliament has passed statute law to imply
some terms into every consumer contract.This process will be examined
in this part of the book, and some of the terms implied can be found in
Part 5 on Consumer Protection.
The different types of terms found in a contract
The terms within a contract are clearly not all of the same importance.
Referring back to the carpet example, the price of the carpet is obviously
of vital importance to the buyer, whereas it is of lesser importance
whether the fitting is carried out by two or three people, providing the
task is done.The distinction between different types of terms in a contract
will be examined here.