Oral Agreements

Although oral contracts are very commonly entered into on an everyday basis, most commercial litigation concerns written agreements. Yet a number of cases concerning oral contracts have recently reached the Supreme Court—most notably Wells v Devani, MWB Business Exchange Centres v Rock Advertising and Barton v Morris—and judges have taken very different approaches in all of them. Difficulties are not limited to oral agreements which have contractual effect: in Guest v Guest the Supreme Court split on the approach to be taken to remedies for proprietary estoppel. This article analyses those decisions and argues that the same fundamental principles of contract law should apply to both oral and written contracts.