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I INTRODUCTION Of the 2.4 million actively trading businesses in Australia, 99.8 per cent are small to medium-sized enterprises ('SMEs'). (1) This sector contributes approximately 55 per cent to Australia's [...], The small to medium-sized enterprise ('SME') sector is the largest and most productive in Australia. Like all established market-based economies, ours is characterised by the use of contracts as a mechanism for exchange. Contracts often require variation in response to variables such as under-pricing, resource availability, changes in scope, and rising product costs, so SMEs (and larger businesses) will frequently encounter the process of renegotiation. The rules applicable to contract renegotiation seldom receive attention in academic writing. Moreover, the attitudes toward, understandings of, and experiences with the doctrine of renegotiation among Australian SMEs are scarcely researched. This article expounds the law of renegotiation before reporting on selected findings from a largescale empirical study designed to fill these knowledge gaps, among others, in the literature. The results provide invaluable insight into how this critically important sector perceives and deals with contract law and the doctrine of renegotiation, and underscores potential areas for improvement.

There is currently a great deal of hype surrounding non-fungible tokens (NFT), fuelled largely by several high-profile and high-priced purchases. NFTs, which harness blockchain technology and represent digitally tokenised versions of assets, are largely misunderstood by regulators, lawyers, and even their users. Although they tend to have aesthetic and sentimental appeal, NFTs are also something of a legal anomaly. This article seeks to explain, in comprehensible terms, what NFTs are, and to highlight some of the key concerns that arise from their use across a variety of legal fields including contract, consumer, corporate, taxation and intellectual property law. It is ultimately concluded that users should, for the reasons provided, exercise great caution when entering the NFT market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomous smart contracts and the blockchain are flagship technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. They are already in commercial use and uptake will undoubtedly increase as their many cost and efficiency benefits are realized. Already, advanced applications of smart contracts that integrate Artificial Intelligence are being developed at a feverish pace. The prospect of smart contracts being vested with the coded capacity to autonomously make “decisions” for their human parties is both exciting and unnerving. The obvious legal question that arises is whether the parties can plead the doctrine of mistake if the smart contract makes a decision that is unintended, irrational (in the sense that no rational human actor would have made the same decision through the organically intuitive human decision-making process), and undesirable. This Article addresses this novel question under American and Anglo-Australian contract law, ultimately concluding that in most cases the mistake doctrine likely will not avail aggrieved parties when a smart con-tract makes a “bad” decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An unprecedented number of consumer problems has been caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, not least with regard to refunds of prepayments and the ability of consumers to keep up their monthly payments under loan and rental agreements. Based on a notion of societal force majeure sketched in this paper, we propose guiding principles in respect of the introduction of moratoria on recurring payments, the use of refunds or vouchers in respect of prepayments, and associated enforcement challenges. This analysis draws on experiences around the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part 2-3 of the Australian Consumer Law contains a set of provisions specifically regulating unfair contract terms in standard form contracts. The provisions, as originally enacted on 1 January 2011, applied only to consumer contracts but were legislatively amended to apply to small business contracts as of 12 November 2016. This extension was said to account for the comparable vulnerability of small businesses to unfair terms in standard form contracts, and to encourage small businesses to confidently agree to standard form contracts which more efficiently allocate risk. This article examines the first case brought by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission under the new unfair contract terms small business contract provisions. It explores the Federal Court of Australia's approach to construing and applying the new provisions to the small business context and uses the case as a backdrop against which to revisit the notion that small businesses are as vulnerable as consumers to unfair terms in standard form contracts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]