Lord Hope's talk on contract law

4.04.11

Lord Hope on the role of the judge in developing contract law

A talk which Lord Hope of Craighead gave last autumn to a contract law conference in Jersey, entitled The Role of the Judge in developing Contract Law, has recently been published: 2011 Jersey and Guernsey Law Review, 15(1), 6-20.  The underlying theme is to examine ways in which the contract law of Jersey might develop.  Lord Hope discusses this by considering the obvious influence of English law and also the Scottish model and the DCFR.  The central part of the article is a discussion of the rules of contractual interpretation, which gives it a particular relevance in relation to our current consultation on our Interpretation Discussion Paper (though Lord Hope gave the talk only three days after sitting in the Supreme Court to hear argument in Multi-Link [2010] UKSC 47, so there is no discussion of that case).