Company Law

Business and Company Law

By

Business and Company Law

Introduction

It can be argued that different lawyers have their own perception and approach to resolve legal issues. There are also laws regarding defining the law. One of the most important in these laws is the English doctrine of stare decisis. The paper explores significance and application of this law through solving a case study of P&A Cruise Ltd. Therefore, the paper is presented in an essay format in order to analyse the case situation with respect to the rules governing the formation of a contract. Thus, the paper is limited to the extent and is only concerned about the case situation described earlier.

Discussion

On 10th October 2013, P&A Cruise Ltd (P&A) advertised a second hand cruise liner, the king Henry, for sale in a cruise industry trade journal for £2million. Since, the company has advertised the cruise liner in an industry trade journal, the legal nature of advertisement will be considered as Press Advertising. It is a type of advertising that is performed in a printed medium such as magazine, newspaper or an industry trade journal. It incorporates everything from other media and has an extensive readership base. This type of advertising targets audiences with a more narrow approach. Thus, it can be argued that P&A has targeted the potential customers for their cruise liner with the narrowest approach by advertising in a cruise industry trade journal and not in local newspapers or magazines.

The Concur cruise Ltd offered P&A to hold their cruise liner for the next ten days after watching the advertisement in the trade journal. Concur offered to pay £50,000 for holding the cruise liner for next ten days. Concur and P&A went into the agreement for not selling the cruise liner until ten days. However, it is yet to decide wither it is a binding contract or not. The failure to acknowledge the two different types of contracts is considered as one of the basic systematic issues in the contract law literature in England. It should be noted that the English law possess two different types of contract, which are unilateral and bilateral contracts. A bilateral contract occurs when two individuals or businesses reach an agreement in the form of promise to do things for each other. On the contrary, a unilateral contract is said to occur when a company or individual makes a promise to another (such as Concur promising P&A for paying £50,000, if it does not sell the cruise liner to any other party in the next ten days) with the object and result of persuading that other individual or company (such as, P&A willing to sell the cruise liner to any other buyer if they found the offer attractive but then agreed to take the offer of£50,000 for holding the cruise liner till ten days) to act in particular way.

Although, there is extensive description of these two contracts in various textbooks, but the research fails in describing how contracts are formed. Rather than setting out ...