The Concept of the Principle of Estoppel in the Doctrine of Great Britain and the USA

The relevance of scientific research lies in the fact that the authors of the article explore the legal nature of estoppel in English and American law. Great Britain protects with estoppel the stability of the already established legal connection, and the United States protects with estoppel the confidence in the promise as an independent value of legal circulation. The English legal system fears that over-expansion of estoppel will undermine consensus; the American legal system, by contrast, has long allowed that reliance itself can replace bargain in a number of cases. That is why promissory estoppel in the USA is functionally closer to the general theory of enforceability than in the UK. Estoppel is the central construction of common law, which historically grew out of the procedural and evidentiary mechanisms of Great Britain, but over time turned into a powerful tool for the material and legal protection of trust and the suppression of contradictory behavior. In the doctrines of Great Britain and the USA, estoppel is usually described as a rule of "preclusion": a person is deprived of the opportunity to refer to a fact/right/position if, earlier, by his behavior, he created reasonable confidence in the opposite, and abandoning the previous position will be unfair. The article concluded that estoppel in the UK and the USA has common historical roots, but different trajectories of legislative and law enforcement development. English law has retained doctrinal discipline: promissory estoppel remains an exception built into the system of consideration and limited by the requirements of good faith, clarity of promise and an existing legal relationship. American law, on the contrary, turned promissory estoppel into a more autonomous mechanism for protecting reliance, and collateral estoppel - into a key procedural tool for the inadmissibility of re-consideration of issues already resolved. Therefore, it is possible to talk about a single Anglo-American understanding of estoppel only at a very high level of abstraction; in reality, these are two different models of justice, one corrective, the other largely constituting an obligation.