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Category: Contract

A Christmas Contract Carol

23 December, 200823 December, 2008
| 1 Comment
| Cinema, television and theatre, Contract

A Christmas Carol, via ContractsProf Blog.It is an interesting phenomenon to observe a person’s name becoming a generic description. Take, for example, Shylock, who features in an earlier post on this blog. The name, with a lower-case initial, is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “an extortionate usurer … an abusive term for a moneylender”. Another – perhaps even more famous, and certainly seasonal – example is provided by Scrooge, the anti-hero in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Of this name, the OED says that it is used “to designate a miserly, tight-fisted person or killjoy” (here‘s an example from yesterday’s Irish Times).

This is all by way of introducing a post by Keith Rowley on ContractsProf Blog entitled Ebenezer Scrooge on Contract Formation. He sets out a conversation from the screenplay of a movie version of the story which does not seem to appear in the book. This is neither the first nor the only time that screenplays have taken liberties with this book, my favourite movie version certainly does. In this case, the conversation is added to illustrate Scrooge’s heartlessness at the beginning of the story (before his conversion to the spirt of Christmas at the end of the book).…

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It could be you?

22 December, 200829 December, 2008
| No Comments
| Contract, Irish Society

Lotto panel via the Lotto website.Be careful what you wish for. Many of us hope to win the national lottery; but for the members of a Mayo lotto syndicate, winning the €1,577,578 jackpot on 6 January 2001 did not bring the kind of positive changes they would have wished for. Four members collected the winnings; but a fifth man claimed that, although he was in arrears, he was still a member of the syndicate and thus entitled to a one-fifth share of the winnings. The matter was not resolved amicably, and it went to court. …

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Shylock’s appeal: illegal contracts, specific performance and damages

21 December, 200810 February, 2016
| 3 Comments
| Cinema, television and theatre, Contract

Cover of New Yorker magazine, Dec 22 & 29, 2008.I learn from this week’s New Yorker (cover, left) that the Cardozo School of Law of New York’s Yeshiva University that Shylock was finally able to appeal the judgment rendered against him in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (advance notice | poster (pdf) | YU news story | photos).

A Jewish moneylender in Renaissance Venice, Shylock had made a loan to Antonio, in default of which he would be entitled to a pound of Antonio’s flesh. Antonio defaulted, and Shylock sought specific performance. But, after Portia’s advocacy on behalf of Antonio, the Duke of Venice ruled that Shylock was entitled to a pound of flesh but not a drop of blood, and refused both specific performance and damages in lieu. More than that, for seeking to take Antonio’s life, Shylock was disgraced and forced to convert to Christianity, and his property was forfeit (though half was ultimately settled upon his daughter Jessica, who had converted to Christianity and eloped with her suitor, Lorenzo). …

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Vouching for Consumers

3 September, 200820 December, 2008
| No Comments
| advertising, Consumer, Contract, Irish Society

NCA logo, via their siteThe Consumer Protection Act, 2007 (also here), though it is the latest in a long line of piecemeal legislative forays into the area, nevertheless bids fair to provide substantial protection for consumers, provided both that the National Consumer Agency established under it is vigilant and active in that goal, and that it is allowed to be (for example, it may not survive in its current form calls (for example, by Fine Gael) for its abolition as part of the government’s cost-cutting desire to merge various statutory agencies). One important step was taken yesterday with the publication of draft guidelines for the retail sector. …

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Dell’s Mistake

1 September, 20085 September, 2022
| 9 Comments
| advertising, Contract, Mistaken offers

Dell Logo 2008It is the error everyone online dreams about – a full-price item for practically nothing; and it happened, in Chile. For those who remember the case of the mistaken flights last April, Andres Guadamuz tells us about a massive pricing error made by Dell on its Latin American website last June:

… One of Dell’s main features is the possibility of configuring computers by adding, removing or upgrading components. On 27 June 2008, this feature went wrong, and started subtracting money for an upgrade instead of adding it. … Apparently, some people in Chile found the mistake, and this being the Web 2.0 universe, left messages in Facebook and blogs advertising the gaffe, .. This resulted in an astounding 66 … times increase in sales in that day for Chile, and apparently thousands attempted to get the exploit (unofficially, 15 thousand laptops!). Needless to say, Dell did not fulfil the orders, and offered the affected customers a 15% discount in future sells. …

…

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The Case of the Mistaken Flights

18 April, 200820 August, 2019
| 8 Comments
| advertising, Contract, Mistaken offers

An Aer Lingus Airbus A321 landing at London Heathrow Airport in 2007, via WikipediaLook up, it’s Aer Lingus
Aer Lingus used to know how to do public relations – in my youth a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, it had three very powerful advertising campaigns which had a profound effect on me. One used the Gallagher & Lyle song “Breakaway” (YouTube) featuring the lyric “breakaway, fly across your ocean / breakaway, time has come for you”. The second featured the musical tag line “Look up, it’s Aer Lingus, there’s a little piece of Ireland flyin’ by”, with a little girl playing in a field looking up at an Aer Lingus Boeing flying overhead – it gave rise to Aer Lingus’s most enduring slogan, which I have used at the head of this paragraph. And the third was called “You’re Home” (YouTube) and featured Gabriel’s Oboe; it never failed to induce a catch in the voice, a lump in the throat, and a tear in the eye. Judging by a controversy that has flared over the last day or two, however, they seem long since to have lost this knack for connecting with the Irish zeitgeist. Instead, they have flown into a tempest of controversy which they moved to abate only after two days of pressure amounting to a public relations debacle for the airline.…

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What are websites for?

9 March, 200815 November, 2010
| 1 Comment
| Airline charges, Consumer, Contract, Defamation

There were interesting stories in the media recently, but I have been unable to find any traces of them on the websites of the relevant organisations. Their websites are rather good, and both organisations are media-savvy and tech-savvy, so the continuing absence of any trace of the stories is, to say the least, quite puzzling.

Update (12 March 2008): The National Consumer Agency (NCA), and National Newspapers of Ireland (NNI), for it is they, have still not added these developments to their website. Below the fold, find details of the tricks they are missing.…

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Chicken Soup for the academic soul

23 October, 200723 October, 2007
| 1 Comment
| Contract

Perhaps the presentation below on Concurring Opinions is about Faccenda Chicken Ltd v Fowler [1987] Ch 117?

Chicken, Chicken, Chicken…

posted by Nate Oman

Contracts professors have decided that this presentation is about Frigaliment Importing Co. v. B.N.S. International Sales Corp., 190 F.Supp. 116 (S.D.N.Y. 1960), a case in which Judge Friendly famously began his opinion with the sentence: “The issue is, what is chicken?” The full text of the paper presented below can be found here.

(HT: Pete Fitzgerald, Stetson Law School)

…

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Welcome

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Hi there! Thanks for dropping by. I’m Eoin O’Dell, and this is my blog: Cearta.ie – the Irish for rights.


“Cearta” really is the Irish word for rights, so the title provides a good sense of the scope of this blog.

In general, I write here about private law, free speech, and cyber law; and, in particular, I write about Irish law and education policy.


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