Concise Australian Commercial Law

As with its predecessors, the Seventh Edition of Concise Australian Commercial Law has two principle aims.

The first is to give all students the best chance of understanding the legal environment of business and expose them to the language and perspectives of legal professionals, regulators and others with whom they will increasingly be required to interact in their professional lives. The second is to introduce students to the main areas of commercial law – the law of contract, consumer protection, consumer information privacy, the law of torts, agency law, the law of business organisations and business ethics – in in a way that strikes a balance between the need for clarity, accessibility and simplicity and the need for materials to be challenging, relevant and current. And, of course, we are aware that this balance must now be struck in a world in which a considerable amount of teaching and learning happens in an online environment that inevitably places greater reliance on texts and other materials. For this reason, there are detailed and extensive case summaries and commentaries, many diagrams, flowcharts and tables as well as a set of tutorial activities at the end of each chapter that includes both comprehension-style questions and extended hypotheticals, and an extended introductory section on how to approach the study of commercial law, including advice on how to approach a variety of assessment tasks.

This Edition has been updated to incorporate the many changes to the law that have occurred since the Sixth Edition. There have been a number of important appellate court decisions in each of the topics and significant legislative amendments to the Australian Consumer Law, the Corporations Act and the Privacy Act. The chapter on Business Ethics includes the legislative developments in relation to Modern Slavery, the emergence of ESG as a significant factor in corporate decision-making and the attempts by ASIC and the ACCC to deal with misleading conduct about a corporation’s climate change credentials (“greenwashing”). Finally, a new chapter on Consumer Information Privacy has been included, acknowledging the increasing importance of this aspect of privacy law. Lecturer resources accompanying this textbook will be available in February 2023.