3. Certainty and the intention to create legal relations
Without assuming prior legal knowledge, books in the Directions series introduce and guide readers through key points of law and legal debate. Questions, diagrams, and exercises help readers to engage fully with each subject and check their understanding as they progress. This chapter discusses certainty and the intention to create legal relations. It first considers cases where the parties have used ambiguous or unclear language. It then looks at cases where the parties have deliberately left terms to be agreed at a later date. In the former cases, the agreement is often described as ‘vague’; in the latter cases it is described as ‘incomplete’. The chapter then turns to domestic agreements, commercial agreements, and executory and executed agreements.