Abstract

Fairness and honesty are part of commercial dealings but must be evaluated according to legal principles in legal disputes. This chapter is concerned with the question of how judges manage to combine legal and commercial reasoning to resolve disputes about the meaning of contracts. More specifically, it is concerned with how judges identify what can be referred to as commerciality or ‘business sense.’ This is essentially a question of construction of the terms of a contract, and the preferred approach to construction at the moment is what may be termed liberal contextualism. his paper considers how general principles of legal reasoning may be used to refine how courts use commercial considerations in disputres relating to the construction of commercial contracts.