income-tax receipts
Can I sell a handshake?
<p>Can I charge someone for a hand gesture such as a high five or a handshake? How would a receipt be written for such a thing? It seems like a silly question but I am genuinely curious and want to make sure my social experiment isn't subject to any sort of weird laws that I don't know about.</p>

<p>The way law works is that you don't need to find a law which says you <em>can</em> do something. Instead, there needs to be an absence of a law which says you <em>cannot</em> do that thing. In other words, you can do anything you want so long as there isn't a law which says you can't. It's unlikely that you will find a law in any jurisdiction which says you cannot charge for a handshake.</p>
<p>If you want the charge to be <em>legally binding</em> on the other party, then you need to ensure that the formalities of a valid contract are met. In particular, either each side needs to provide consideration (something of value) or the contract needs to be executed as a deed (<a href="/questions/tagged/england-and-wales" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;england-and-wales&#39;" aria-label="show questions tagged &#39;england-and-wales&#39;" rel="tag" aria-labelledby="england-and-wales-container">england-and-wales</a>).</p>
<p>The party who pays the charge is clearly providing consideration. What about the handshake? Is it something of value?</p>
<p>The rule is that consideration must be &quot;sufficient&quot; but does not need to be &quot;adequate&quot;. That means that it must have <em>some</em> value (however small) but it doesn't need to be valuable enough to be a fair bargain for the parties. This was confirmed by the House of Lords in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappell_%26_Co_Ltd_v_Nestle_Co_Ltd" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Chappell &amp; Co. v Nestle Co. Ltd (1960) AC 97</a> (<a href="/questions/tagged/england-and-wales" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;england-and-wales&#39;" aria-label="show questions tagged &#39;england-and-wales&#39;" rel="tag" aria-labelledby="england-and-wales-container">england-and-wales</a>) which held that empty chocolate wrappers, which would be thrown away upon receipt, were sufficient consideration. A more common example of low-value but sufficient consideration is a &quot;peppercorn&quot; which is often used as token consideration where (in practical terms) a party is not offering anything of substance.</p>
<p>Note that &quot;value&quot; doesn't need to mean something that benefits the recipient. It can also be something which detriments the person who provides it. The courts have held that a promise to do something you were not otherwise legally required to do is sufficient consideration. For example, in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamer_v._Sidway" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Hamer v Sidway (1891) 27 NE 256</a> (<a href="/questions/tagged/new-york-state" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;new-york-state&#39;" aria-label="show questions tagged &#39;new-york-state&#39;" rel="tag" aria-labelledby="new-york-state-container">new-york-state</a>), the court held that a promise to quit smoking was sufficient consideration.</p>
<p>It doesn't matter whether the recipient values the consideration or not. In <em>Chappell</em> (see above) the court held:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is said that when received the wrappers are of no value to
Nestle’s. This I would have thought irrelevant. A contracting party
can stipulate for what consideration he chooses. A peppercorn does not
cease to be good consideration if it is established that the promisee
does not like pepper and will throw away the corn.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A handshake is almost certainly sufficient consideration because it involves doing something that you were under no legal obligation to do before you agreed the contract.</p>
<p>How you write a receipt is a matter of personal choice and therefore off-topic.</p>

<blockquote>
<p>Can I charge someone for a hand gesture such as a high five or a handshake?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Only if you and the counterparty agree beforehand on the topic of compensation. That is because the formation of a contract requires that the parties commit to the terms and conditions <em>knowingly</em> and <em>willfully</em>. Since typically nobody charges for a hand gesture, you need something to supersede the common presumption that also your handshake or high five is for free.</p>
<p>Obviating the agreement about compensation is likely to render a controversy undecidable. For instance, once the handshake is completed and you tell the counterparty to pay you $5, the counterparty could say &quot;<em>Quite the contrary, you owe me $10 for the handshake with me</em>&quot;.</p>
