The Story of Us… and Mistakes in Contracts
First, the cheesy and lovey-dovey part!
I had the privilege of finding love in law school. It was completely unexpected and against pretty much all my preconceptions: about dating a law student, about choosing a date and dating in general, and for that matter, about love in general.
But by sheer divine grace, she is beautiful. I mean that in the deepest sense of the word. She has been my biggest supporter, and so many of my little projects, including this website, would not have existed without her kind encouragement.
This is our story in twenty-six frames, coupled with some of my melodramatic thoughts about unicorns and angels. You are hereby warned that it will be extremely cheesy. Hope you enjoy it :)
And now, ruining the romance: let’s talk about mistakes in contract law!
(Based on an interesting tellonym ask I answered on the What Is Law Even Instagram page, but extended this time)
Contracts are basically agreements, except with some extra legal technicalities. For you and I to “agree” on something, there must be a meeting of our minds—we need to know what we’re agreeing on and vibe with each other on that.
But sometimes, we think we vibe with each other when we actually don’t. So there is no agreement; no meeting of the minds. That’s the idea of “mistake” in contract law, and there’s three different types of them.
The three ways we could be mistaken…
Let’s illustrate these by jumping off from the agreement in our story: Babe and I agreed that both of us would never date another law student.
First, let’s say Babe and I had entirely different ideas of what it meant to “date” someone. Maybe she thought that “date” meant “being romantically attached to” while I thought that “date” meant “going out one-on-one with”. That means we never really agreed on anything, and that’s called a “mutual mistake”.
On the other hand, let’s say that when we made our agreement, Babe thought that I wasn’t a law student (spoiler: I am one). And let’s say she wasn’t all that interested in me, but I wanted to narrow her options and get a better chance of being with her. So I get Babe to agree to never date another law student. In this case, because Babe was mistaken and I knew about that, we call this a “unilateral mistake” (“unilateral” means “one side”).
Finally, we go back to how our story actually unfolded—Babe and I turned out to both be mistaken about the same thing. We were both pretty confident that we would never date another law student, but it turns out that our expectations were wrong. At least for me, dating a law student seemed like a bad idea until I saw that I was being touched by an angel. When people agree based on completely wrong expectations, that’s called a “common mistake”.
In most cases, any kind of mistake means that the agreement could disappear (this part gets incredibly complicated). So the mistake can’t be just some small detail. It must be something major, that the agreement could not stand without. Something like expecting not to date a law student, and then finding out that they’re not all that bad.
Conclusion
Of course, it gets much more complicated than this. Contract law doesn’t really care about the agreement that Babe and I made (because technically, it lacks consideration), and in the common law world, there are different concepts for mistakes at common law and equity, each with different consequences.
For the legally-trained among us: as I explained on the old Tellonym post, once you ignore the lack of consideration for the underlying agreement, our story actually fulfils all the requirements for common mistake. We were super sure about not dating another law student, so we never considered allocating the risks of falling for each other between us, and this mistaken assumption meant that we were both making a fundamental error when entering into our agreement. Additionally, our mistaken assumption existed before we made our agreement, and none of us was at fault for making the other person fall for us. With all this in mind, even though the law really wants to uphold agreements (“sanctity of contract”), this was one of those wholly exceptional circumstances where the original agreement could not stand.
Much cheers to everyone, hope this has added some cringe-upon-cheese to your day, and hope you enjoyed this little musing of mine :)