Jun 20, 2012 | Lead Articles, Number 3, Print Edition, Volume 45
Symposium—Contract as Promise at 30: The Future of Contract Theory Charles Fried wrote Contract as Promise because he objected to the idea—growing increasingly prevalent in the years preceding the book’s publication—that something other than moral duty underlay the...
Jun 20, 2012 | Lead Articles, Number 3, Print Edition, Volume 45
Symposium—Contract as Promise at 30: The Future of Contract Theory Thirty years after its publication, Contract as Promise remains the canonical presentation of a liberal, autonomy-based conception of contractual obligation. In Charles Fried’s words, “The moral force...
Jun 20, 2012 | Lead Articles, Number 3, Print Edition, Volume 45
Symposium—Contract as Promise at 30: The Future of Contract Theory In the 1980s, Charles Fried was right to focus on what was missing from both the “death of contract” and “law and economics” approaches to contract law: the internal morality of contract. But he...
Jun 20, 2012 | Lead Articles, Number 3, Print Edition, Volume 45
Symposium—Contract as Promise at 30: The Future of Contract Theory This article begins to articulate a theory that a central moral concern in contract law in action is flexibility to recognize the need for adjustment, release, and forgiveness among good faith parties,...
Jun 20, 2012 | Lead Articles, Number 3, Print Edition, Volume 45
Symposium—Contract as Promise at 30: The Future of Contract Theory Charles Fried’s Contract as Promise is the first post-realist will theory of contract. It is post-realist in two senses. First, Fried has learned the lessons of the realist critique of Langdellian...
Jun 20, 2012 | Lead Articles, Number 3, Print Edition, Volume 45
Symposium—Contract as Promise at 30: The Future of Contract Theory Charles Fried’s 1981 book, Contract as Promise, started the modern discussion in the United States and many other places on contract theory, and remains an influential view to which all contract...
