A promissory estoppel is a situation that arises when a promise or agreement that is not fulfilled to plan. The central point to this legal standard is that when a person promises something to another person, the promise is of an economic type. This is because after the promise is made, the promisee then makes actions because of the belief in the person who made the promise to live up to it. A court action can be taken by the person who was promised to retrieve the losses the person incurred due to believing that the promise would take place.
This is usually something that comes up in terms of an inheritence when a person promises to gift a piece of property or other asset to a person who then gets rid of their old possession to make way for the new one only to find that there will not be a new one because the promise to gift was not kept. It is illegal for a person to make promises to another person of a financial nature which gives rise to them making financial based decisions contradictory to those they would otherwise have opted for if the promise had not been made.