Acknowledgements
Several people have helped make this OER textbook, as well as the earlier editions of it, possible. This is my chance to thank them. First, I would like to thank Ian Edwards and Antoinette Cass who have guided me through the process and done all the heavy work involved in converting the text to the required format. I also thank Kana Nakano who provided research assistance for this – the fourth – edition, as well as the research assistants who worked on the first three editions: Alysha Bayes, Thomas Berger, Shane Cooper, William Ewing, Loren Holly, Steven Jamieson, Carly Johnston, Nitay-Yair Levi, Wilhelmina Masih, Madeline Taylor, and Weerapoln Wasuruj (Joey).
I thank Nick James – Executive Dean of the Faculty of Law at Bond University & Co-Executive Director of the Centre for Professional Legal Education – for the wonderful and insightful foreword.
Further, I thank my colleagues Jim Corkery and Brenda Marshall for their valuable feedback on earlier editions, and William Van Caenegem, Umair Ghori, and Laura-Leigh Cameron-Dow for many interesting discussions on topics covered in this book.
I want to thank the talented group of students who I have had the pleasure of working with in ‘Contracts Law B’ and in the ‘Law of Obligations’ at Bond University, for their helpful and insightful comments on early drafts of this book and its earlier edition.
Finally, I want to thank my wife, Bianca, my daughter Freja, son Felix, and my dog Fenris, for their patience and support.
In addition to these conventional acknowledgements (as in expressions of my gratitude), I also want to make another type of acknowledgement and stress something that teachers seemingly rarely tell their students; our views of the law may change. Sometimes, such change is limited to a new way of articulating the law. Not least with many of the areas of law covered in this book, one commentator may choose to express the law as involving three “steps”, while another expresses the law in involving four “steps” – be wary of those who claim their way is the only way.
On other occasions, our views of the law change more fundamentally. Since writing this fourth edition, I have published two journal articles within the topic of this book. One (written with Kana Nakano and William Van Caenegem) addresses misleading or deceptive conduct, and another written in honour of my former colleague Denis Ong, on unconscionability. While the former mainly expands on themes already found in this book, the latter includes some departures from how I thought about the law when writing this edition. I encourage all students to remain open to re-examining their views from time to time not just during law school but throughout your careers.
Professor Dan Jerker B. Svantesson
BA (LTU, Sweden), MA (LTU, Sweden),
LLM (UNSW, Australia), PhD (UNSW, Australia)
Mudgeeraba (Australia)
29 September 2022
