One of the great benefits of being a law student in the American case law system, as opposed to the civil law code system, is that American law students learn these principles in terms of actual cases with facts and real people, which I think makes it easier to remember the principles. You could learn the principle. The principle is an advertisement to the public is not an offer because it doesn't contain committal terms, etc, etc. Okay, you could learn that. But it's a lot more fun. And I think easier to remember if you think, oh, yeah, there was the case where the kid said that The Pepsi Company had made him an offer to get a fighter jet for 7 million Pepsi points and the court said no because it was a joke. It's actually a fairly recent case from the 1990s from the federal court in New York. And the case is called Leonard v. PepsiCo. And in some ways, it's an update of the great Carbolic Smokeball Company case that some of you have read in your classes. So what's the case about? The case is about the definition of offer, and it's also about the objective theory of contracts. That is, what would a reasonable person understand in the circumstances? So the case involves an ad for Pepsi and the ad is a TV commercial, which is basically a takeoff on the kind of “Ferris Bueller's Day Off” high school movies from the 1990s. It's an exaggerated fantasy. Basically, it shows how for consuming a certain amount of Pepsi, you can get a certain amount of Pepsi points and you can get prizes for this. So, you know, 75 Pepsi points gets you a t-shirt, and 175 Pepsi points gets you sunglasses, things like that. But the last scene in this ad is a kid flying a fighter jet to his high school and landing on the front lawn and of course it makes a big stir and the teachers are embarrassed and all of this. And it says at the bottom, you know, Fighter Jet, 7 million Pepsi points. Okay. So some kid sees this commercial and thinks this is a real offer. And so he starts collecting Pepsi points, he soon realizes he can't possibly consume enough Pepsi to get 7 million Pepsi points. But somehow he convinces friends and acquaintances to raise 700,000 dollars, which gets him 7 million Pepsi points. He puts all this together and he goes to Pepsi and he says, okay, here is the equivalent of 7 million Pepsi points. Give me the fighter jet. First Pepsi thinks it's a joke. And then Pepsi says, no, of course not. This wasn't an offer. Okay? So the case is all about whether in that TV commercial, Pepsi made an offer. We promise to give you a fighter jet if you give us 7 million Pepsi points. Notwithstanding a very strong argument by the kid in this case, the judge decides, no, no, no, no, this is not a real offer. Why? Because it's obviously a joke. It's an exaggerated adolescent fantasy, the court says. A reasonable person looking at this commercial would understand that Pepsi is not seriously committing to give you a fighter jet for 7 million Pepsi points. I mean, for one thing, the fighter jet is worth 23 million dollars. It's not worth 700,000 dollars. That should have been a key right there. Second, of course, It's just not legal to fly fighter jets around and go to high school, so it's not like you could do this anyway. It's a useful case, both because the facts are sort of fun, but also because it really explores the idea of the objective theory of contracts. We ask in contracts, what would a reasonable person in the position of the listener, or in this case the viewer, what would a reasonable person in that circumstance understand? And in this case, the court says, Absolutely, a reasonable person would not understand this to be a serious offer. Now, I must tell you, I've taught this case for a few years now, and there always are a substantial number of my students who think. No, no, this really was an offer, and this kid had every right to demand a fighter jet from Pepsi as a result of this offer. I've never quite understood that, but maybe that's because I'm not a member of the Pepsi generation.