Advise the parties on their legal position. Has a contract come into being and with whom?

On Monday at 10.00am Bernice makes an offer of £4,500 and  they both agree that if Bernice doesn’t hear from Andréa before 9.00pm then the offer has been accepted. In the mean time Andréa is out and Curtis makes an offer which is more than Bernice’s. Then David also makes an offer by posting a letter which he misaddresses and arrives late. Andrea accepts Bernice’s offer but then when she gets in and sees Curtis’s offer she tells Bernice to ignore it. As she wishes to go for Curtis offer. In this scenario I will be discussing offer, acceptance postal rules and instantaneous communications as these are the legal issues raised within this scenario.

Bernice seems to have made a clear offer of £4,500 and this offers seems to be communicated to Andrea on Monday morning at 10.00am when Bernice says that she will assume that the offered been accepted unless she hers from Andrea by 9.00pm that evening.

Curtis’s offer of £4,750 is only communicated on Monday 11:00am however it is communicated to Andrea at 9.30pm when she gets home and sees the note which does seem to be an acceptance of the offer.

On Monday 2.15pm David posted a letter to Andrea accepting the offer which she had received on Friday to buy the caravan for £4,750. This letter was not received for four days. Therefore this requires consideration of the postal rules. In Adams v Lindsell (1818) B& ALD 681 are that the defendants wrote to the plaintiffs on 2 September, offering to sell them some wool and requested that the plaintiffs reply ‘in course of post’. The letter which contained the offer was wrongly addressed and therefore the plaintiffs did not receive it until 5 September.

As a result of this delay, the letter of acceptance was not received until 9 September by the defendants, and this was two days later than the defendants would have expected to receive it. Because of this, on 8 September the defendants had sold the wool to a third person.

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The question for the court in Adams v Lindsell was therefore whether a contract of sale had been entered into before 8 September when the wool was sold to the third party. If the acceptance was effective when it arrived at the address or when the defendant saw it, then no contract would have been made and the sale to the third party would amount to revocation of the offer. However, the court held that the offer had been accepted as soon as the letter had been posted.

 In Adams v Lindsell there was a contract in existed before ...

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