LexED2
Introduction to Law: all pages
  1. Courses
  2. Introduction to Law
  3. Activity 10

Contract Law

PLA 1003Activity 10·12 min read

Why it Matters

Every time you click “I Agree,” sign a lease, accept a job offer, or buy something online, you may be binding yourself to terms a court will enforce. Contract law decides which promises the legal system will back with its power and which are just talk. Knowing how an agreement actually forms lets you recognize when you are committing yourself, when the other side is, and what happens when someone walks away. That recognition is useful whether you become a lawyer, work as a paralegal, run a business, or simply want to understand what you agreed to before you tapped the button.

Current Context

In January 2026, a federal judge in the Southern District of Ohio entered a default judgment holding that Anna’s Archive was bound by WorldCat’s terms of use, reasoning that a sophisticated party scraping the site daily had constructive notice of a browsewrap agreement it never clicked to accept. Getting there took two years: the court denied an earlier motion, certified questions of Ohio law that the Ohio Supreme Court declined to answer, and then received OCLC’s renewed motion for default judgment in November 2025. The outcome cuts against the pattern in Specht v. Netscape, where terms a user never clearly accepted did not bind him, and it does so by looking at who the user was rather than at how the notice was designed. Keep that in mind during Part 3. When you judge whether the platform’s terms would hold up against you, the answer may turn on facts about you and not only on the design of the screen.

Key Concepts

Contract

A legally enforceable agreement between two or more parties that creates duties the law will back. Not every promise is a contract. The law enforces only those that meet specific requirements, which is why understanding formation matters before anything else.

Offer

A clear proposal by one party to enter an agreement on specific terms, communicated so that the other party can accept and close the deal. An offer has to be definite enough that a court could tell what was promised. Vague expressions of interest or invitations to negotiate are not offers.

Acceptance

Agreement to the terms of the offer, given in the way the offer allows. Acceptance can come through words, a signature, or conduct, such as clicking a button or performing the requested act. It generally has to match the offer rather than change its terms.

Consideration

Something of value that each side gives or promises in exchange for what the other gives or promises. It is the element that separates an enforceable bargain from a one-sided gift, which courts will not enforce. The thing exchanged can be money, a service, a promise, or giving up a legal right you otherwise had.

Mutual Assent

The shared agreement of the parties to be bound, often described as a “meeting of the minds.” Courts measure assent objectively, asking what a reasonable person would conclude from the parties’ words and conduct, not from their private intentions. This is why someone cannot escape a deal by claiming they were secretly joking.

Breach

A failure to perform a contractual duty when performance is due, without a legal excuse. A breach can be total or partial, and not every minor shortfall counts as one. Identifying breach is the first step toward knowing whether a remedy is available.

Remedy

The relief a court gives the non-breaching party to make up for a breach. The most common remedy is money damages meant to put the injured party where performance would have. Less often, a court orders specific performance, meaning the breaching party must actually do what was promised.

Clickwrap and Browsewrap

Two ways online agreements try to bind users. A clickwrap requires an affirmative act, such as checking a box or clicking “I Agree,” before the user can proceed. A browsewrap merely posts terms somewhere on the site and treats continued use as acceptance, an approach courts often refuse to enforce because the user never clearly assented.

Resources

Foundational Case Bank

These are the cases most U.S. Contracts courses are built around. Each one settled a question about how a contract forms, how it must be performed, or what a court will do when one is broken. Several are English decisions, because American common law was inherited from England and these opinions still anchor the doctrine here. Read at least one full opinion in Part 2; the rest are here for reference across the unit. You can open each through the link below or pull it on Westlaw by name.

Formation

Performance

Remedies

What to Do

This activity walks you from the foundations of contract formation through a classic court opinion and into a modern agreement you accept without thinking. The skill you are building is issue spotting: looking at a set of facts and identifying whether the elements of a contract are present and what follows if one is missing. You will use AI as a sparring partner that questions your reasoning, not as an answer key that hands you conclusions.

Part 1: The Foundations

Start by building a working map of how contracts form and what happens when they fail. Read the Cornell LII overview on contract and the entry on consideration, then use the Doctrinal Mapper prompt to organize the elements into the three phases of formation, performance, and remedies. Push the AI to explain the distinction between a contract and an unenforceable gift, since that line trips up most beginners. When you finish, you should be able to state in your own words what each element requires and why a promise can fall apart for lack of any one of them.

Part 2: Brief a Case from the Canon

Now apply the map to a real opinion. Choose one case from the Foundational Case Bank above and read the full text on Westlaw or through the link provided. Pick a case from a category that interests you, and try not to pick the same one as the people next to you, so the class covers the whole canon between us. Before you look at any summary, brief the case in your own words: the facts, the question the court had to decide, the holding, and the court’s reasoning. Then use the Socratic Examiner prompt to have the AI question your brief and surface anything you missed, and use the Doctrinal Mapper’s output from Part 1 to place your case in the formation, performance, or remedies frame and explain how it relates to the cases around it. Read the judge’s actual reasoning closely, because the objective theory of assent that runs through a case like Lucy v. Zehmer is the same idea that governs the online agreements in Part 3.

Part 3: The Agreement You Already Signed

Shift to a contract that already binds you. Pick a social media platform, streaming service, or app you use regularly, search for its Terms of Service, and find the moment of formation: the screen or step where you supposedly accepted. Use the Formation Analyzer prompt to walk through whether there was a valid offer, acceptance, and consideration, and whether the terms were presented as a clickwrap or a browsewrap. Connect what you find to Specht v. Netscape, which held that terms a user never clearly assented to may not bind them. The goal is to judge, with the doctrine in hand, whether the agreement you accepted would actually hold up.

Part 4: Verify Before You Trust

AI tools confidently state contract rules and cite cases that do not exist. Take two or three specific claims the AI made in Parts 1 through 3, a stated rule, a case name, or a description of a holding, and check each against a primary source using Cornell LII or Westlaw through the Daytona State library. Use the Citation Checker prompt to structure the review. Note which claims held up, which were imprecise, and whether any authority was fabricated. This is the habit that separates a paralegal a lawyer can rely on from one who cannot.

Part 5: Summary and Reflection

Write a 400 to 600 word reflection on what you learned. Begin with the classic case: how did your own reading of Lucy v. Zehmer compare to the AI’s summary, and what did the judge’s words show you about legal reasoning that a summary left out? Then turn to the modern agreement: what surprised you about the terms you have been accepting, and would that agreement satisfy the formation elements you mapped in Part 1? Close by connecting the two. After moving from a restaurant-check contract to a clickwrap you scrolled past, what do you now think a contract really is, and did the idea of freedom to make your own binding agreements feel more meaningful, more complicated, or both?

Include one AI chat link with a 1–2 sentence explanation of what the conversation shows and why you chose to share it.

Suggested AI Prompts

Use these prompts as a starting point, then adjust them to fit your goal. Strong prompting develops through trial, revision, and testing. It’s a foundational skill that grows into more advanced AI work such as context engineering and agent-based workflows.

Doctrinal Mapper

I’m a student in an Introduction to Law survey course beginning the contract law unit. Give me a clear but accurate overview of contract law organized into three phases: Formation, Performance, and Remedies. Under Formation, cover offer, acceptance, consideration, and mutual assent, and name the main defenses that can defeat a contract, such as lack of capacity, duress, or fraud. Under Performance, explain conditions, substantial performance, breach, and anticipatory repudiation. Under Remedies, explain expectation damages, reliance damages, restitution, and specific performance. Use correct legal terms but define each one in plain language the first time you use it. End by explaining, with a simple example, why the law enforces a bargain but not a one-sided gift.

This prompt uses role assignment and structured output: it sets the audience and forces the model to fill a fixed three-part frame rather than wandering, so you get a comparable map every time instead of whatever the model finds most interesting.

Socratic Examiner

You are a law professor running a Socratic dialogue. I am studying a landmark contract case and will give you the case name and my own brief of it: the facts, the issue, the holding, and the court’s reasoning. Do not give me the answer or your own summary. Instead, ask me one question at a time that tests my reasoning, drawing on the elements of contract law: who the parties were and what each one did, which element of formation, performance, or remedies the case turns on, what rule the court announced, and why the losing side’s argument failed. After each answer I give, point out any gap or error and ask a follow-up. Only after I have worked through the brief should you confirm what I got right and what I missed.

This is Socratic elicitation: by forbidding the model from answering and limiting it to one question at a time, you keep your own reasoning in the driver’s seat and use the AI to find the holes in it rather than to fill them for you.

Formation Analyzer

Act as a contract analyst. I will paste the Terms of Service for an app or platform I use. Walk through the Formation stage only, in this order. First, identify whether there is a valid offer and quote the specific language that makes it one. Second, identify how acceptance occurs and state whether this is a clickwrap, which requires an affirmative click, or a browsewrap, which treats mere use as acceptance. Third, identify the consideration each side gives. Reference Specht v. Netscape, 306 F.3d 17 (2d Cir. 2002), where the court refused to enforce terms a user never clearly assented to, and tell me whether this agreement looks more or less enforceable than the terms in that case. Pause after the analysis and ask me what questions I have before going further.

This combines source grounding with decomposition: anchoring the analysis to a named controlling case and breaking formation into ordered sub-questions keeps the model from giving a vague summary, and the structure is the seed of a repeatable contract-review workflow.

Citation Checker

I am going to give you several statements about contract law that an AI tool generated, including a case name and a rule. For each statement, tell me how confident you are that it is accurate and flag anything you are uncertain about. Do not confirm a case exists or describe its holding unless you are confident; if you are not sure, say so plainly and tell me to verify it against Cornell LII or Westlaw. List any claim that you think may be wrong, imprecise, or fabricated, and explain why. Treat your job as catching errors, not reassuring me.

This is a verification and red-teaming prompt: asking the model to surface its own uncertainty and hunt for its own errors works against the tendency of AI tools to state confident, sometimes fabricated, legal authority, and it builds the habit of checking every cite against a primary source.

Search LexED2

Type to search every activity. Press Esc to close.