Contract Law
... Lord Denning’s reason for deciding that the appeal should be dismissed, in the Court of Appeal, was that he felt there was a concluded contract, sufficiently evidenced by writing, which Mr Gibson is entitled to have specifically performed. ... The respondent bought an action claiming there was a binding contract for the sale of the house between himself and the council, through the letter he received from the city treasurer on 10th February and his acceptance of the offer by returning the application on 5th March and his letter of 18th March, claiming specific performance of the contract. The county court judge held that there was a concluded contract for the sale of the house by the council and ordered specific performance. ... c) The decision held by the House of Lords in the case of Gibson v Manchester City Council was that the parties had not concluded a binding contract because the council had never made an offer capable of acceptance, since the statements in the city treasurer’s letter of 10th February that the council ‘may be prepared to sell’ and inviting the respondent ‘to make formal application to buy’ were not an offer to sell but merely an invitation to treat. ... Such an approach almost invariably results in a subjective assessment of the parties’ actions taking place and has the disadvantages of rendering the law uncertain and unpredictable. ... Lord Diplock described this approach, in the case of Gibson v Manchester City Council, as the ‘conventional approach’ of looking at the handful of documents relied on as constituting the contract sued on and seeing whether on their true construction there is to be found in them a contractual offer by the council to sell the house to Mr Gibson and an acceptance of that offer by Mr Gibson.