Micro-teaching: Concepts of Law: The Concept of Consideration in Contract Formation in Common Law Contracts

This paper shares the experience of using an illustrative approach to teaching the concept of consideration in the formation of Common Law contracts. The focus is on teaching and learning rather than attempting to provide a legal treatise.

 Consideration is a particularly abstract concept of the Common Law legal system and one which is foreign to the thinking of people from a Civil Law jurisdiction. In the author’s experience, students have traditionally had difficulty absorbing, and more particularly, articulating the concept. Yet, without consideration, there can be no enforceable contract. Hence understanding the concept is fundamental to all business (and other) contractual transactions.

 The paper looks at statements of law from a number of sources and then outlines an illustrative whiteboard approach in the classroom to approaching the concept. Finally, the author looks at before and after samples of actual student responses to an assignment task requiring articulation of the concept.