Humble Good Faith ‘3 x 4’ - Asia and Australia Meet the Dean

Join us on Tuesday 2 March for an exclusive webinar for alumni, friends and supporters of Oxford Law based across Asia and Australasia with the Dean, Professor Mindy Chen-Wishart. Mindy will discuss her latest research addressing the place of good faith in common law, as well as setting out her vision for the future of Oxford Law.

The webinar is free to attend and will be run using Zoom, so if you have not done so already, please download Zoom onto your device. A link to join the meeting will be sent to registrants the day before. The deadline for registering is midday Friday 26 February 2021. Following registration, the Zoom link to attend the launch will be sent to participants.

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Synopsis

Contrary to orthodoxy, good faith is no stranger to common law. Properly understood, we have been “speaking prose all our lives without knowing it”. The debate over whether to introduce a doctrine of good faith is therefore misconceived—the horse has bolted; the stable door has opened. Rather, the salient questions are: (i) How can a good faith requirement be justified? (ii) What role should it play in the evolution of contract law? (iii) What does it require? and (iv) How can we start to taxonomize its demands?

Good faith is a threefold attitude of honesty, fair dealing and fidelity to the contractual purpose that is constitutive of the activity of contracting. This is manifest in many contract law rules that apply with different intensity and effect to four identifiable categories of contracts. This is good faith “3 by 4”. Open recognition of this humble version of good faith will: make explicit the implicit ethical content of the common law of contract, enhance our understanding and organization of many apparently disparate rules, legitimize these rules and facilitate legal development in a manner consistent with common law incrementalism. This leaves open the policy questions of how far and how fast common law should travel along the road of good faith.

About the Dean: Mindy Chen-Wishart

Mindy Chen-Wishart is Dean and Professor of the Law of Contract at the Faculty of Law at Oxford University and a Fellow of Merton College. She holds a fractional Professorship at the National University of Singapore and is the Cheng Yu Tung Visiting Professor, Hong Kong University. She has also visited and taught at Law Schools in Germany, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, and Taiwan. She is author of Contract Law (6th ed), and of numerous articles on the theory, doctrine and comparative law of contract. She is an Editor of Chitty on Contracts (now 33rd ed), and of the six-book series on Studies in the Contract Laws of Asia, of which the three have been published. Mindy was a member of the Advisory Group on A Restatement of the English Law of Contract, and has lectured to the Judicial College of England and Wales, and the judiciary in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

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