The Reach of Contract I : On Third Party Effects of Contract, with Particular Regard to Third Party Contracts and Direct Claims

The idea that a contract should affect other people than the parties has seemingly always been a provocative notion. A contract binds the contracting parties – and only them – together in a legal relationship, and yet according to contemporary law a contract can have various legal effects for third parties, i.e. non-parties. The parties can conclude a contract for the benefit of a third party, and third parties can be affected by the contracts of others pursuant to both statutory law and uncodified general principles of law. The legal theme of contractual third party effects involves both theoretical and practical challenges. This doctoral dissertation addresses a number of these challenges, by examining (mainly) Swedish and Nordic private law sources. The study explores third party contracts and direct claims, as well as the relationship between these two legal figures, by placing them in a historical and theoretical context and by performing a series of contextualizing readings of sources revealing developments in both case law and legal scholarship. The research is based on a legal scientific methodology, enriched by theoretical and methodological imports pillaged from the classical teachings and contemporary scholarship on rhetoric. The result can be characterized as a form of rhetorically infused, topically oriented, hermeneutic study of contemporary legal discourse on third party effects of contract.