Symposium—Contract as Promise at 30: The Future of Contract Theory
Contract theory has long been preoccupied with the common law. Contracts is taught in the first year of law school along with the other “common law subjects.” The rise of the modern view of contracts as involving mutually dependent undertakings—as opposed to the earlier independent covenants model—was carried out by the common law courts. Contracts are usually enforced with damages, the classic common law remedy. From proto-realists like Holmes, through the realists and their successors in law and economics, theorists have emphasized the law and downplayed the special role of equity, as developed over the centuries by Chancery and building on a tradition of thought going back at least to Aristotle. Equity is treated either with disdain as useless moralizing or with impatience as a mere proto-version of freewheeling contextualized inquiry that the law courts should be engaging in without artificial constraints of a separate “equity.” Whether they have been antimoralists, formalists, realists, or consequentialists, commentators have been quite unified in their preference for contract law over equity. . .