When a contract breaks down, clients come to you with urgent, practical questions: do we still have to perform, can we end this, and what money can we claim? Breach of contract is the framework that answers them. Getting it right protects the client; getting it wrong — for example, terminating when you had no right to — can flip the breach onto your own client. This is everyday work for any solicitor advising on commercial dealings, sales, services, or property.
This lesson builds the analysis step by step:
- What Breach Is — what counts as a breach, the forms it takes, and what a claimant must establish.
- Classification of Terms — conditions, warranties, and innominate terms, and what each lets the innocent party do.
- How a Term Becomes a Condition — the routes by which a term gains condition status, and the limits of labels.
- Time Stipulations — when time is 'of the essence' and how to make it so by notice.
- Repudiatory and Anticipatory Breach — the breaches serious enough to allow termination, including before performance is due.
- Election: Acceptance and Affirmation — the choice to end the contract or hold the other side to it, and its risks.
- Consequences of Termination — what survives, what falls away, and how it differs from rescission.
- Entire and Severable Obligations — when payment depends on complete performance, and the substantial performance rule.
- Damages: Measure and Limits — how loss is measured and the limits of remoteness and mitigation.