Here are select March 2013 rulings of the Supreme Court of the Philippines on civil law:

Civil Code

Contracts; contract of sale; perfection; essential elements; stages. A contract of sale is perfected at the moment there is a meeting of minds upon the thing which is the object of the contract and upon the price. Thus, for a contract of sale to be valid, all of the following essential elements must concur: a) consent or meeting of the minds; b) determinate subject matter; and c) price certain in money or its equivalent.

As for the price, fixing it can never be left to the decision of only one of the contracting parties. But a price fixed by one of the contracting parties, if accepted by the other, gives rise to a perfected sale.

As regards consent, when there is merely an offer by one party without acceptance of the other, there is no contract. The decision to accept a bidder’s proposal must be communicated to the bidder. However, a binding contract may exist between the parties whose minds have met, although they did not affix their signatures to any written document, as acceptance may be expressed or implied. It can be inferred from the contemporaneous and subsequent acts of the contracting parties. Thus, the Supreme Court has held:

x x x The rule is that except where a formal acceptance is so required, although the acceptance must be affirmatively and clearly made and must be evidenced by some acts or conduct communicated to the offeror, it may be made either in a formal or an informal manner, and may be shown by acts, conduct, or words of the accepting party that clearly manifest a present intention or determination to accept the offer to buy or sell. Thus, acceptance may be shown by the acts, conduct, or words of a party recognizing the existence of the contract of sale.

Contracts undergo three stages: (a) negotiation that begins from the time the prospective contracting parties... 

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