>but if you enter a contract with the intent to violate it, is that legal? My understanding is that it's technically illegal (only civil perhaps, but still illegal), the impracticality of enforcement notwithstanding.

On the first matter, I'm not sure, it might be fraud, which can be civil or criminal if there's a specific law that defines criminal penalties.

Again I guess the proposal could be that a law specifies that the resale of tickets is a so and so crime (misdemeanor?) and carries a penalty of X. We are steelmanning the argument here, and it still sounds quite untenable.

On the civil front, I can see how the intent to breach a term might be relevant, but I can also see how it might be irrelevant, in the sense that the breaching party would be forced to remedy the damages of the breach, no more no less. How would the intent to breach a term increase or reduce the damage caused by the breach if so?

>Also, I have no idea if the contract for a ticket "sale" is really considered a contract for the purposes of such laws.

On the second matter, it really is. The layman perception of a contract is usually a formal document that needs to be signed, whereas in no legal systems that I know of are these actual elements of a contract. In most legal systems a contract is a much broader concept: a private agreement between two parties, with the main defining elements being offer, acceptance and consideration. Most if not all trade transactions are contracts, they include the main elements.