7 ms·

It's a good story but I think you oversell it. Carbolic Smoke Ball was heard in 1892, peppercorn rents (literal and figurative) predate that case by hundreds of

by Y_Y 2y ago

It's a good story but I think you oversell it. Carbolic Smoke Ball was heard in 1892, peppercorn rents (literal and figurative) predate that case by hundreds of years.

ricree 2y ago
To elaborate on your points some more: the basic building blocks of contract law were already well established by the time Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball came about. The main question at hand was whether these could apply when the offer was made to the public at large rather than to any specific person or group.
tialaramex 2y ago
That's fair. Contract law was not invented from scratch to give Mrs Carlill the win, but much of the modern formalisation around the ingredients for a legal contract does date back to that case. Also this models what we were discussing. What exactly the rules were for contracts drifted over time as people's intuitions and experiences changed, things that everybody just accepted as normal in 1825 seem insane in 2025 - when I was born there wasn't yet an Unfair Contract Terms Act for example - if you didn't read carefully maybe you're trapped in a deal that any fool could see was abusive, but the courts can't fix it.
- Y_Y 2y ago
  You make a worthwhile point, and I think that we're talking about the same thing from different perspectives. For example I'm glad the Unfair Contract Terms Act (and its successors exist), but I would have considered it a formalisation of existing, inconsistently applied, principles. As I see it, the magic of common law is that actual decisions can depend on which way the wind is blowing at the time, while keeping vague long-term ideals. The concept clearly had some support in the Doctrine of Fundamental Breach. Perhaps you were already born in time for e.g. Canada Steamship Lines Ltd v The King (1952) which limited the ability to include exclusions for liability in a contract, in a way that that wasn't codified until the Unfair Contracts Terms Act. Anyway I think we don't substantially disagree, and I think it's valuable to have a range of reasonable conceptualizations of the same history.

by Y_Y 2y ago

It's a good story but I think you oversell it. Carbolic Smoke Ball was heard in 1892, peppercorn rents (literal and figurative) predate that case by hundreds of years.

ricree 2y ago

To elaborate on your points some more: the basic building blocks of contract law were already well established by the time Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball came about. The main question at hand was whether these could apply when the offer was made to the public at large rather than to any specific person or group.

tialaramex 2y ago

That's fair. Contract law was not invented from scratch to give Mrs Carlill the win, but much of the modern formalisation around the ingredients for a legal contract does date back to that case. Also this models what we were discussing. What exactly the rules were for contracts drifted over time as people's intuitions and experiences changed, things that everybody just accepted as normal in 1825 seem insane in 2025 - when I was born there wasn't yet an Unfair Contract Terms Act for example - if you didn't read carefully maybe you're trapped in a deal that any fool could see was abusive, but the courts can't fix it.

Y_Y 2y ago
You make a worthwhile point, and I think that we're talking about the same thing from different perspectives. For example I'm glad the Unfair Contract Terms Act (and its successors exist), but I would have considered it a formalisation of existing, inconsistently applied, principles. As I see it, the magic of common law is that actual decisions can depend on which way the wind is blowing at the time, while keeping vague long-term ideals. The concept clearly had some support in the Doctrine of Fundamental Breach. Perhaps you were already born in time for e.g. Canada Steamship Lines Ltd v The King (1952) which limited the ability to include exclusions for liability in a contract, in a way that that wasn't codified until the Unfair Contracts Terms Act. Anyway I think we don't substantially disagree, and I think it's valuable to have a range of reasonable conceptualizations of the same history.