In reading the first 3 chapters of the textbook, you’ve had a chance to learn a lot about how and when contracts are created. However, for as much as you learned how and when contracts are created, you have not had to think much about a bigger question: why are contracts created? One legal scholar, Professor C. Scott Pryor, has endeavored to describe a biblical worldview approach to evaluating an important contract law doctrine you’ve just learned about, the doctrine of consideration as a basis for enforcing contracts.
The first section of his article, which you were assigned this week, discusses the “preliminary groundwork” necessary for answering 2 questions:
- What purpose does consideration serve?
- What are the proper limits on the doctrine of consideration?
Professor Pryor’s preliminary groundwork takes the form of 3 doctrines and 3 perspectives for answering those questions.
Each of the 3 perspectives suggests why promises should be enforced and some limits to when they should be enforced. Provide a summary of all 3 of the assigned portions of the Article’s perspectives. After your summary, choose 1 of those 3 perspectives and discuss why that perspective might provide an appropriate limit on the courts’ power to enforce some contracts. Last, at the end of your discussion, write a short hypothetical fact pattern that you have created where consideration exists between 2 parties, but the perspective you choose suggests that courts should not enforce the contract.
