Reliance Interest Protection Of Contract Law

Since contract law alone cannot provide enough protection to reliance that secures safety of trade, reliance interest protection has become fairly important in modern commercial world. Reliance interest theory opens up a middle way to protect reliance other than expectation interest and restitution interest. Although study on reliance interest at home and abroad has gained some accomplishment, some key problems remain unsolved, such as the concept of reliance interest, the constitutive requires, the application scope, the recovery scope and limit. This Thesis sets purchase contracts as the study context, and tries to line up the above problems, so as to give some insight to theoretical study and the legislation on reliance interest protection.Besides Introduction, this Thesis contains four chapters as follows:Chapter One first defines the concept of reliance interest and other relative concepts, and then analyzes two existing mechanisms that somehow protect reliance interest, Liability arising from negligence and Estoppels, and concludes that there is a need to establish a systematic reliance interest protection mechanism.Chapter Two is on the application scope of reliance interest and the constitutive requirements of reliance interest protection. The application scope should include the circumstances with valid contracts but expectation interest not definite and the circumstances with reasonable reliance but without valid contracts.Chapter Three discusses the recovery of reliance interest. It points out that the recovery of reliance interest should be limited to "No Better Than" Principle, and should be subject to other restriction rules, such as the foreseeable rule.Chapter Four analyzes the current legislation status on reliance interest protection, and gives some advice to improve it.