Catherine Mitchell, Vanishing Contract Law: Common Law in the Age of Contracts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022, 259 pp, hb, £85.00. To those engaged in the study or practice of contract law, the idea that ‘contract law, and the judicially created common law in particular, is disappearing’ (1) will be surprising. After all, in recent years a number of important contract law cases have made their way through the appellate courts (Barton v Morris [2023] UKSC 3 on implied terms and restitution, Times Travel (UK) Ltd v Pakistan International Airlines Corp [2021] UKSC 40 on lawful act duress, FSHC Group Holdings Limited v Glas Trust Corporation Ltd[2019] EWCA Civ 1361 on rectification for common mistake, and Morris-Garner v One Step (Support) Ltd [2018] UKSC 20 on negotiating damages, to name a few). But the claim made by Professor Catherine Mitchell in her fascinating new book, Vanishing Contract Law: Common Law in the Age of Contracts, is not that the common law of contract is ‘disappearing’ in a literal sense; it is that its role, particularly in non-commercial cases, has ‘diminished’ …
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Jordan English, Catherine Mitchell, Vanishing Contract Law: Common Law in the Age of Contracts, Modern Law Review, Volume 86, Issue 5, September 2023, pages 1298-1302. First published: 27 April 2023.
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