INTRODUCTION

You book a cab on an app, tap “Confirm”, and a driver you have never met turns up at your gate in Belapur. Nobody signed anything, nobody spoke a legal word, and yet if the driver cancels at the last minute or you refuse to pay, you both know a wrong has been done. Why does a tap on a phone create something the law will enforce? That is the question the whole of this paper answers, and this first topic asks the simplest version of it: what is a contract, where did our law of contract come from, and why does a statute from 1872 still run your daily life?

In two minutes

A contract is an agreement that the law will enforce; the Indian Contract Act 1872 builds it from a proposal, an acceptance, a promise and a consideration, and every later topic in this paper is a closer look at one of those links.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Law of Contract and Specific Relief on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.