CLP: Does English law on relational contracts require legislative reform?

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Speaker: Professor Miriam Goldby (Queen Mary University of London)
Chair: TBC

About this event

The contract law landscape looked very different just 60 years ago from the landscape we have today. The UK had not yet joined the EU. Very little statutory activity in this field had occurred with almost no legislation having been enacted apart from Mackenzie Chalmers’ commercial law trinity: The Bills of Exchange Act 1882, the Sale of Goods Act 1893 and the Marine Insurance Act 1906. These were eventually followed by the Law Reform (Frustrated Contracts) Act 1943, which was rendered necessary by the upheaval caused by WW-II, but statutory enactments remained few and far between. This began to change in areas where the courts’ piecemeal approach to reforming the law proved insufficient, with early examples being the Misrepresentation Act 1967 and the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 and more recent ones including the Equality Act 2010 and the Consumer Rights Act 2015. In this lecture I will examine why it was that legal development by the courts proved insufficient to address the relevant legal issues on which legislation was enacted, or in other words, what made legislative intervention necessary. Based on these considerations, I will then evaluate whether the law governing so-called relational contracts may require similar legislative intervention.

About the speaker

Miriam Goldby is Professor of Shipping, Insurance and Commercial Law at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London. She has held the roles of director of the Centre’s Insurance, Shipping and Aviation Law Institute (2019-2022), founder and director of its International Shipping Law LLM (2013-2022) and Director of Research for CCLS (2021-2024). She is the author of Electronic Documents in Maritime Trade: Law and Practice (OUP), the second edition of which was published in 2019, and has published extensively in the fields of shipping, insurance and financial law. Read full profile.

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