Contract Law

Contract Law? What is contract? Contract in legal sense refers to an agreement between two or more parties that is legally binding between them. It is an agreement enforceable by law. The contract must be dealing with law of contract in Malaysia in the Contracts Act 1950.

Agreement means i understand what you understand and you understand what i understand between legal people. All contract is an agreement but all agreements are not automatically contracts. This is because they lack of certain essential element.

What is the neccessary elements for a legal contract?
The essential elements of contract include proposal (offer) and acceptance, intention to create legal relations, consideration, legal capacity, legality, certainty, and free consent.

Basically discharge of contract occurs in three ways which are discharge by performance, discard by frustation and discharge by breach of contract.

Nowadays people prefer to sign or prepared contract over the internet. Internet is use to facilitate transaction and contracts as the transaction are being formed electronically. E-transaction become more popular due to few advantages of internet which are cost and time saving, increasing in productivity, increasing in profitability, can be access to customer in anywhere anytime and access to huge market.

Althought E-Commerce bring a lot of benefits to people but it also have to face some challenges too. For instant, should all transaction and communications be print out on paper and signed there fo make them legally binding? Can data message be redeem as an "written information" for the purpose of fulling the requirement? How to fulfil the requirement of signature?

As signature serves as method of authetication. Malaysia government have released Digital Signature Act 1997. The Act requires that a digitally signed message is deemed to have fulfillied the signature requirement.

Malaysia parliament passed the Electonic Commerce Act 2006 that seeks to set rules and legal recognitions and protection on the transactions that take place electronically on year 2006. After that, the law is adopted following the model law of e-commerce that was issued by UN body in charge of international trade law (UNCITRAL).