Professor Jordan English awarded prestigious Birks Prize for contractual law book

Congratulations to Jordan English, Associate Professor of Law and Tutorial Fellow at Magdalen College, who has been awarded the Society of Legal Scholars’ 2025 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Early Career Scholarship for his new book, Discharge of Contractual Obligations (OUP 2025).

This prestigious prize is awarded annually for outstanding books by early-career legal academics. The judges described Professor English’s book as “a superb example of traditional doctrinal private scholarship at its best, arguing for a common understanding of three areas of contract law, usually treated as distinct”.

Professor English said: “It is a real honour to have received the SLS Peter Birks Prize. A number of great scholars, who I look up to, have been shortlisted for or won the prize. To join their ranks is a real delight. But like all achievements, it was not done alone. I am especially gratefully to my colleagues, mentors and friends who have all engaged with the work, and to my family for giving me an environment in which I could flourish.”

The book delves into a fundamental question: under what circumstances are parties released from their contractual duties for reasons other than performance of those duties? By re-examining cases of breach, frustration and common mistake – three key doctrines in modern English contract law – the monograph demonstrates how these disparate areas of contract law can all be understood through a single concept.

Championing the once-dominant ‘failure of condition’ model in English law, Professor English argues that ordinarily, parties do not promise to perform their contractual duties ‘no matter what’ – instead, they make promises that depend on various explicit and implicit conditions. 

Across ten comprehensive chapters, the book explores the theoretical and practical implications of the modern shift away from focusing on the conditionality of obligations to perform. Recognising that a wholesale return to the failure of condition model is improbable, the book charts a pragmatic course, illustrating how several practical issues – such as whether a party in breach can terminate due to the other party’s breach – are effectively rectified by revitalising this forgotten approach.