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Learning Contracts

3rd Edition
Jack Graves | Henry Allen Blair
ISBN: 9781636593036
Subject: Contracts
Format: Print & Electronic - Hardbound
Page Count: 745
Copyright: 2022 | Status: In Stock

This title utilizes our CasebookPlus™ platform. Learn more at Faculty-CasebookPlus.com.

This is not Professor Kingsfield's casebook. In fact, there's very little that's traditional about Learning Contracts.

Instead, Learning Contracts organizes the waterfront of core contract law, theory, and policy into fifty discrete lessons. While the book works seamlessly in bricks-and-mortar classes, it was expressly built for today's increasingly diverse world of online, flipped, hybrid or blended learning formats, and it works uniquely well in each of these settings. Moreover, the newest edition of Learning Contracts puts professors in the driver's seat, offering unparalleled customizability and flexibility.

Each lesson begins with clearly articulated outcomes, which are followed by highly structured presentations, detailed explanations, illustrative examples, and helpful summaries, all working together to make the doctrine, theory, and policy of contracts readily accessible to students. Additionally, each and every lesson employs a comprehensive and consistent comparative approach, systematically addressing not only the common law, but also UCC Article 2 and the Convention on the International Sale of Goods (CISG).

Like other titles in the Learning series, Learning Contracts relies on very few cases. The examples in each lesson are frequently based on classic contracts cases—and the robust supplemental materials offer edited texts of cases for many lessons for those who want to inject more case method into their class. But rather than relying heavily on the case method, which can often leave students hanging, Learning Contracts provides students with the tools they need to learn the basic law in advance and spend the vast majority of their class time putting doctrine, theory, and policy into practice, while working through problems presented at the end of each lesson and in the supplemental materials.

Just as the book doesn't leave students hanging, this edition of Learning Contracts doesn't leave professors hanging. It comes with a trove of supplemental materials, all developed specifically for this book. The supplemental materials include a robust teacher's manual, additional in-class problems, longer problems with model explanations and answers that can be used for quizzes or sample exams, multiple-choice questions (with detailed explanations) designed for this book, additional fully edited cases for many lessons, and PowerPoint slides for use with each lesson.


Imprint: West Academic Publishing
Series: Learning Series
Publication Date: 12/30/2021

Jack Graves, Syracuse University College of Law

Henry Allen Blair, Mitchell Hamline School of Law

CasebookPlus™

This title is available in our CasebookPlus format. CasebookPlus provides support beyond your classroom lectures and materials by offering additional digital resources to you and your students. Anchored by faculty-authored formative self-assessments keyed to our most popular casebooks, CasebookPlus allows students to test their understanding of core concepts as they are learning them in class – on their own, outside of the classroom, with no extra work on your part. CasebookPlus combines three important elements:

  • A new print or digital casebook
  • Access to a downloadable eBook with the ability to highlight and add notes
  • 12-month access to a digital Learning Library complete with:
Multiple-choice self-assessment questions, including:
  • Chapter questions keyed to the casebook
  • Black Letter Law questions (available in select subjects)
  • Subject area review questions for end of semester use
Essay and short answer questions with sample answers and expert commentary, in 1L and select upper-level subjects

Leading digital study aids, an outline starter, and audio lectures in select subjects

Students can still utilize CasebookPlus digital resources if they’ve purchased a used book or are renting their text by purchasing the Learning Library at westacademic.com.

With CasebookPlus, you can customize your students’ learning experience and monitor their performance. The quiz editor allows you to create your own custom quiz set, suppress specific quiz questions or quiz sets, and time-release quiz questions. Additionally, the flexible, customized reporting capability helps you evaluate your students’ understanding of the material and can also help your school demonstrate compliance with the new ABA Assessment and Learning Outcomes standards.

The third edition of Learning Contracts makes two significant organizational changes; adds a new Lesson encouraging critical thinking and more clearly teeing up issues involving diversity, equity, and inclusion; and adds a few new doctrinal elements.

The text moves mutual assent to the forefront by changing the chapter presentation sequence, as between consideration and contract formation. While either sequence can be justified, the authors believe the change to be pedagogically superior, especially with the newly added introductory materials on mutual assent in Lesson 2.

The text also changes the sequence between the lessons presenting the parol evidence rule, the plain meaning rule, and contract interpretation. Again, the purpose of the change is improved teachability, and the authors believe the new sequencing to be pedagogically superior based on their combined experience in teaching from the first two editions of Learning Contracts.

The text includes an entirely new Lesson introducing mutual assent in Lesson 2 and doing so with two specific objectives in mind. First, students are encouraged, at the outset, to recognize some of the shortcomings of modern contract law and to think critically about issues of mutual assent in modern contract practices. Second, a least some of the current critiques relate to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and the introduction of these issues here, at the outset, helps to set them up for later discussion in association with various contract law defenses.

Finally, the text includes a few minor new doctrinal inclusions, as well as a few new case examples. However, there have been no significant changes in basic contract doctrine since the last edition.

Learn more about this series.