Conclusion and Outlook

The current work started with a comparative legal analysis of the contractual mistake doctrine in German and English law. It was found that despite their common historical origins contemplating the Roman law of mistake and the almost equal importance of parties’ intentions in the effective contract formation, there are considerable differences as to the scope of the issues and the circumstances in which the rescission of a declaration of intent or promise based on a mistake of a contracting party is possible. To this end, it was found to be more relevant to systematize the respective mistake types under both legal systems according to the nature and character of the underlying mistake rather than its legal operativeness regime. This approach allows to abstract from the peculiarities of how legal systems treat any given type of mistake and concentrate on the similarities between the respective mistake types. As a result, general mistake categories decking all the mistake types in each legal system were proposed: (1) mistakes about the reason to enter a contract, (2) mistakes about the content of a contract, and (3) mistakes in the expression. This systematization better elucidates the similarities of the mistake doctrines in German and English law and allows considering AI-made mistakes from a unified perspective, at least when it comes to the types of mistakes that occur during the contract formation process.