Professor Charlie Webb

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time) and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is not available as an outside option.

This course has a limited number of places and demand is typically high. This may mean that you’re not able to get a place on this course.

Undergraduate contract law

The module will examine a range of remedial issues in a commercial context. The reading addresses both case law and academic commentary.

Here is an indicative list of the sorts of issues to be considered on the module:

1. The aims of commercial remedies: What interests and other policies may be served by the law when remedying commercial disputes?

2. The function of contract damages: How do the courts assess damages for breaches of contract?  Should the courts do more to protect the claimant’s interest in performance?  What limits are placed on the recovery or measure of damages?

3. Gain-based remedies: When does the law allow claimants to recover a defendant’s wrongful gains?  On what basis are gain-based remedies awarded?

4. Agreed remedies: To what extent are commercial parties free to fix the remedies available to them in the event of breach?  Does freedom of contract extend to the parties’ secondary obligations?

5. Unjust enrichment: What is the law of unjust enrichment?  What is its relationship to the law of contract?  What can commercial parties recover under the law of unjust enrichment?

This course has 20 hours of teaching content in Lent Term. There will be a Reading Week in Week 6.

All students are expected to produce one 1,500 word formative essay during the course.

Burrows, Remedies for Torts and Breach of Contract (4th edn OUP 2019)

Virgo and Worthingon (eds), Commercial Remedies: Resolving Controversies (CUP 2017)

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours, reading time: 15 minutes) in the summer exam period.