Consideration in eCommerce
Deveral Capps
Track/Slide 3
This is some 35 years later in the case of Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company
Ltd. v Selfridge.
“An act of forbearance of one party or the promise thereof is the price for which the promise of the other is bought and the promise thus given for value is enforceable ”. My, that makes a lot of sense doesn’t it. That essentially again just simply means that the actual consideration... there must be some consideration in order for the contract to actually be enforceable.
Now I can give you a simple definition. “Consideration is the price paid for the promise”. That is my definition of consideration, “the price paid for the promise”. All the Ps. And that is a simple definition of what consideration actually is. It
’s the price that’s paid by the individual for the promise that they say that they are going to do something. But when we are talking about the price, the price can be anything. And the two previous definitions that we have looked at have dealt both with the idea that the promise itself or the price doesn’t actually have to be something where it’s given. It can also be some detriment that is suffered. But either way, it’s still a price. There is some value that is associated with it. And you must ensure that when you have some consideration, it must be valuable consideration. It must be sufficient but it need not be adequate. And that’s when we have peppercorn rents, for example, where an individual is giving something of value like a peppercorn in order to rent a particular property. But the actual peppercorn, even though the peppercorn has such a low value, it still has some value attached to it, and therefore it is sufficient. But obviously giving someone a peppercorn to rent
Buckingham Palace is nowhere near going to be adequate. But consideration doesn’t have to be adequate, it just must only be sufficient. But I don’t want to go on too much about consideration, what it is and what it should be, because that’s something that of course you will have dealt with before now. But you must be aware that you must have consideration in order for a contract to become enforceable. Without consideration that particular contract is not enforceable.