First Principles of Business Law

5. Assessing the seriousness of a breach of contract

5.1. Alternative approaches

Not every breach of contract is of the same importance. Some breaches may be of little importance: others may be far more significant. The importance of a particular breach affects the legal consequences that follow, so it is important not only to be able to establish the fact of a breach, but also to work out whether it is a serious breach or not.

In order to determine how serious a particular breach of contract is, the courts very often distinguish between those terms in the contract that are of fundamental importance (sometimes described as the terms that 'go to the root of the contract') and those terms that are of less than fundamental importance.

In other cases, the courts choose not to decide which are the more and less important terms in the contract, but look instead at the consequences of the breach and then decide how serious these consequences were.

In this section of the module, you will learn from examples how to determone the seriousness of a breach of contract.