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 available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

Students should have ideally studied Contract Law at undergraduate level.

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.

The module will examine a range of remedial issues in a commercial context. The syllabus does not seek to provide an exhaustive account of the law governing commercial remedies but instead picks out a series of questions of both practical and theoretical significance that can arise in commercial disputes.  In addressing these questions, we shall not only examine the answers English law has given to these questions but also consider the soundness of those solutions and alternative approaches which have been proposed in the literature. 

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? 

3. Punishment: Is punishment of a defendant who has committed a breach of duty ever a legitimate aim of commercial remedies?  Should punitive damages have a greater role in English law?

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 Winter Term. There will be a Reading Week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

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 spring exam period.