Assignment

Under contract law, a reward offer is binding, so that the offeror of a reward must pay a person who completed performance for the offered reward.

A person has a responsibility to return lost personal property to its rightful owner.

The question posed by this assignment is: What happens if those two rules collide? What if Alan finds Bart's object and THEN Bart offers a reward for the return of the object?

Can Alan insist on the reward as a pre-condition for the return? Can Bart retract that reward because Alan had a pre-existing duty to return the property before the reward was offered? Or, do they both just sue each other to enforce their respective duties? Which of these alternatives (or something else) do you think will be enforced by a court?

Assume that both Alan and Bart live in the city of Boring, Oregon and that all events involved in this assignment occurred in that city.

Please note that many of the best cases for this assignment are really old cases. That is okay. There is nothing wrong with using old cases if they're the best ones and have not been overruled more recently.