Contract Law in Common Law Countries: A Study in Divergence

This special issue is the result of the 2021 co-operation between the London Centre for Commercial and Financial Law (LCF) and Jindal Global Law School (JGLS) in India. It has been a huge pleasure to work together on this three-part conference series in 2021 and to co-edit this special issue with the Liverpool Law Review. Both of us had been fascinated with the evolution of the common law of contract across jurisdictions for some years, which is perhaps natural as we are situated within common law jurisdictions. The journey that the original English common law took from its highly integrated life in an English jurisdiction held together by the Privy Coun-cil into a more and more loosely connected network of Commonwealth countries and their independent court systems and legislatures, resulted in a variety of emana-tions of contract law issues. Some countries have codified their contract law. Some countries practice an active reference to the traditional body of English case law. Other countries have civil law influence as well and operate a layered or mixed system of laws where concepts of both traditions come into play. Thus, our idea was to have an exploration into the diversity of approaches to contract law within common law jurisdictions.Our conference series provided an opportunity for all those with an interest in contract law issues to delve into a comparative analysis. We invited participants to pick a topic along three broad themes—the formation of the contract, its substance and terms, and termination and remedies. Each participant contrasted the approach of two or more common law jurisdictions, with the UK necessarily being one of the chosen jurisdictions. What had initially been envisioned as a physical conference was pushed online due to the pandemic and spread out thematically across three separate virtual conferences. Although a decision taken amidst a great tragedy