Ideally, a contract is breached if one party fails to perform according to the terms either written or oral, in absence of a legitimate legal cause. More often, breaching of the contract is one of the major causes of damages in a lawsuit or court ordering a “specific performance” of the contract. Based on this introduction, Jimmy breached the contract by failing to perform as per the terms without any legal cause (Anderson, 2015) . On one hand, the seller (Jimmy) sent an offer in form of a letter inviting Tommy to buy a painting. On the other hand, the buyer (Tommy) accepts the offer by writing back to the buyer and also attaching the $500,000 check as the consideration for the contract. The offer sent to the buyer was conditional regarding the duration it will expire if there no response or acceptance. This means that the buyer would have taken the maximum time of one month to accept the buy offer made ( Hawkins, 2017). Tommy accepted the offer two weeks earlier before the expiration and thus, meeting the terms of the contract. The act of Jimmy to sell the painting before the expiration of stipulated time breached the terms of the contract.
In a Common Law, the plaintiff in the breach of contract recovers recover the damages of the sum or value of an equal amount to what would have been received if the contract was fully performed by the other party (Andrews, 2016) . As an equitable remedy, a specific performance compels the defendant to perform as practicable as stipulated in terms of the contract. This remedy is often applied if the monetary damage is not enough of compensating the plaintiff the for the contract breach. In this case, Jimmy would be required to either offer another painting similar to the original one.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
References
Anderson, R. R. (2015). The Compensatory Disgorgement Alternative to Restatement Third's New Remedy for Breach of Contract. SML Rev. , 68 , 953.
Andrews, N. (2016). Remedies for Breach of Contract. In Arbitration and Contract Law (pp. 279-333). Springer, Cham.
Burrows, J. F., Todd, S. M., & Finn, J. (2016). Law of Contract in New Zealand: A Successor to Cheshire & Fifoot's Law of Contract, New Zealand Edition . LexisNexis NZ Limited.
Hawkins, D. (2017). Breach of Contract. Wisconsin Law Journal .
