Contract Law’s Red Herring: Exposing “Intention” as a Guise for Consideration
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper describes and evaluates the contested fourth requirement for contract formation: the intention of both parties that their agreement be legally enforceable (“legal intention”). I begin with an overview of the jurisprudence on legal intention, ending with the Supreme Court of Canada’s most recent pronouncement in Ethiopian Orthodox Church of Canada St. Mary Cathedral v Aga. While the Court in this case affirmed that legal intention is to be treated as a fourth requirement, its analysis reveals precisely the reason why it should not be: when courts purport to analyze legal intention, an inherently difficult value to assess, they often lapse into a veiled assessment of consideration instead. I draw on Peter Benson's conception of "robust consideration" to argue that we should dispense with the legal intention requirement. In its place, a clear test for robust consideration would allow courts to conduct self-aware analyses free from contorted intention assessments. I conclude by offering an interpretation of Balfour v Balfour, the seminar case supporting a legal intention requirement, that is consistent with my proposed approach to contract formation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it