Payment obligations in commercial and financial transactions

Of all contractual obligations, the duty to pay money is the most fundamental. It is also conceptually the most complex. What exactly do we mean by money? How is it to be distinguished from a claim? What is the effect of a change in the internal or external purchasing power of a particular currency on the rights and obligations of a party entitled to receive or obliged to pay in that currency? When is payment due and when is it considered to have been made? These and other issues affecting money and money obligations are the subject to the following five lectures, in which I have eneavoured to analyse, within a modest compass, a range of current problems the answers to which continue to elude us. For a comprehensive treatment of the whole field reference should be made to Dr. F.A. Mann's superb study, The Legal Aspect of Money, the fourth edition of whoch was published last year.