Scholars have produced a wide variety of theoretical work on contract law. This is the first book to compile it, to present it coherently, to evaluate it, and to supply numerous references to additional sources. The author also offers his own practical perspective that emphasizes contract law's richness and complexity and questions the utility of abstract unitary theories. The author argues that, notwithstanding contract law's complexity, it successfully facilitates the formation and enforcement of private arrangements and ensures a degree of fairness in the process of exchange. Each chapter presents a pair of largely contrasting theories to clarify the central issue of contract law and theory, to set forth the range of views, and to help identify a practical middle ground. Among the contract theories discussed and analyzed are promise, contextual, feminist, formal, mainstream, critical, economic, empirical, and relational. The book should interest legal theorists, practising lawyers, law students, and general readers who want to learn more about contract law and theory.

This casebook focuses not only on the rules and principles of contract law, but also on the lawyer's role in planning and drafting contracts and on the richness of contract theory. It has comprehensive coverage of contract law and related obligation, the latter including promissory estoppel, restitution, and tort arising in the contract setting. This book is primarily a case book designed to help students develop important analytical and critical skills, but also has ample notes, problems, and excerpts that focus on the nature, function, and limits of contract and related law. Features of the new Fifth Edition include: several recent cases that bring important issues up to date; new notes and comments about recent developments in contract law and recent contract controversies in the news; and new excerpts from the secondary literature focusing on major recent developments.

In Liberalizing Contracts Anat Rosenberg examines nineteenth-century liberal thought in England, as developed through, and as it developed, the concept of contract, understood as the formal legal category of binding agreement, and the relations and human practices at which it gestured, most basically that of promise, most broadly the capitalist market order. She does so by placing canonical realist novels in conversation with legal-historical knowledge about Victorian contracts. Rosenberg argues that current understandings of the liberal effort in contracts need reconstructing from both ends of Henry Maine's famed aphorism, which described a historical progress "from status to contract." On the side of contract, historical accounts of its liberal content have been oscillating between atomism and social-collective approaches, missing out on forms of relationality in Victorian liberal conceptualizations of contracts which the book establishes in their complexity, richness, and wavering appeal. On the side of status, the expectation of a move "from status" has led to a split along the liberal/radical fault line among those assessing liberalism's historical commitment to promote mobility and equality. The split misses out on the possibility that liberalism functioned as a historical reinterpretation of statuses – particularly gender and class – rather than either an effort of their elimination or preservation. As Rosenberg shows, that reinterpretation effectively secured, yet also altered, gender and class hierarchies. There is no teleology to such an account.

The Dignity of Commerce is a rigorous and novel exploration of moral justification of contract law through how it fosters well-functioning markets. Nathan B. Oman demonstrates how contract law deals overwhelmingly with the matters of commercial exchange, and how commerce in turn breeds habits of mind, or virtues, that support a liberal society. He also shows how markets provide a framework for peaceful cooperation across the fault lines of race, culture, religion, and politics that outdo even democratic political institutions. The Dignity of Commerce is ambitious in its aims and its conclusions and the implications are powerful. It is sure to elicit a serious discussion at the very heart of one of the most central areas of legal studies, and Nathan B. Oman has provided a clear, engaging, and comprehensive vehicle to get the discussion started.

Obligations: New Trajectories in Law provides a critical analysis of the role of obligations in contemporary legal and social practices. As rights have become the preeminent feature of modern political and legal discourse, the work of obligations has been overshadowed. Questioning and correcting this dominant image of our time, this book brings obligations back into view in a way that fits better with the realities of contemporary social life. Following a historical account of the changing place and priorities of obligations in modernity, the book analyses how obligations and practices of obedience are core to understanding how law sustains conditions of inequality. But it also explores the enduring role obligations play in furthering individual and collective well-being, highlighting their significance in practices that prioritize human and environmental needs, common goods, and solidarity. In doing so, it also offers an alternative and cogent assessment of the force, and the potential, of obligations in contemporary societies. This original jurisprudential contribution will appeal to an academic and student readership in law, politics, and the social sciences.

A unique comparative analysis of Chinese contract law accessible to lawyers from civil, common, and mixed law jurisdictions.

This book is the most comprehensive, rigorous critique of contemporary Hobbesian contractarianism as expounded in the work of Jean Hampton, Gregory Kavka, and David Gauthier. Professor Kraus argues that the attempts by these three philosophers to use Hobbes to answer current political and moral questions fail. The reasons why they fail are related to fundamental problems intrinsic to Hobbesian contractarianism: first, the problem of collective action arising out of the tension in Hobbes' theory between individual and collective rationality; second, the classical problem of explaining the normative force of hypothetical action, a problem that can be traced to the conflicting strategies of hypothetical justification found in Rawls' and Hobbes' theories. Given the deep interest in Hobbesian contractarianism among philosophers, political theorists, game theorists in economics and political science, and legal theorists, this book is likely to attract wide attention and infuse new life into the contractarian debate.