Interpreting contracts in English law is an area of English contract law, which concerns how the courts decide what an agreement means. It is settled law that the process is based on the objective view of a reasonable person, given the context in which the contracting parties made their agreement. This approach marks a break with previous a more rigid modes of interpretation before the 1970s, where courts paid closer attention to the formal expression of the parties' intentions and took more of a literal view of what they had said.
The process of interpretation was often skewed by courts who tried to construe contracts in a way that was fair. Before the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977, the courts had not developed a jurisdiction to strike down unfair terms. When faced with harsh exclusion clauses they would often "interpret their way out" of the plain meaning of the clause through a process of strict construction against the party relying on a clause (in Latin, contra proferentem). This would often run contrary to the common sense meaning of a contractual document, and embodied a strained approach.