Promises On Prior Obligations At Common Law

An historical analysis of the development and reform of the law of prior obligations as expressed in preexisting duty rule and past consideration rule. Teeven's principal focus is on the judicial rationalization of common law reforms to partially remove the bar to enforcement of promises grounded in the past. This study traces American deviations from English common law doctrine over the past two centuries in developing theories to overcome traditional impediments to recovery presented by the law of prior obligations. It also explores ideas for further reforms found buried in past case law. The growing unease with both the dashing of legitimate consensual expectations and the perceived unfairness to naive, ill-informed, and otherwise disadvantaged parties served as the impetus for liberalization of the exclusive contract bargain test. The resultant reforms adhered to the modern realist emphasis on fairness. The expansion of contractual liability to include promises looking to the past encompasses some of the most important reforms of the consideration contract since its genesis. As a consequence, contractual liability can no longer be defined solely in terms of bargain consideration since contract law now includes a broader range of promissory liability.

This book considers the development of contract law doctrine in England from 1670 to 1870.

This book is a history of American contract law around the turn of the twentieth century. It meticulously details shifts in our conception of contract by juxtaposing scholarly accounts of contract with case law, and shows how the cases exhibit conflicts for which scholarship offers just one of many possible answers. Breaking with conventional wisdom, the author argues that our current understanding of contract is not the outgrowth of gradual refinements of a centuries-old idea. Rather, contract as we now know it was shaped by a revolution in private law undertaken toward the end of the nineteenth century, when legal scholars established calculating promisors as the centerpiece of their notion of contract. The author maintains that the revolution in contract thinking is best understood in a frame of reference wider than the rules governing the formation and enforcement of contracts. That frame of reference is a cultural negotiation over the nature of the individual subject and the role of the individual in a society undergoing transformation. Areas of central concern include the enforceability of promises to make gifts; the relationship of contracts to speculation and gambling; and the problem of incomplete contracts.

Gifts: A Study in Comparative Law is the first broad-based study of the law governing the giving and revocation of gifts ever attempted. Gift-giving is everywhere governed by social and customary norms before it encounters the law and the giving of gifts takes place largely outside of the marketplace. As a result of these two characteristics, the law of gifts provides an optimal lens through which to examine how different legal systems engage with social practice. The law of gifts is well-developed both in the civil and the common laws. Richard Hyland's study provides an excellent view of the ways in which different civil and common law jurisdictions confront common issues. The legal systems discussed include principally, in the common law, those of Great Britain, the United States, and India, and, in the civil law, the private law systems of Belgium and France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Professor Hyland also serves a critique of the dominant method in the field, which is a form of functionalism based on what is called the praesumptio similitudinis, namely the axiom that, once legal doctrine is stripped away, developed legal systems tend to reach similar practical results. His study demonstrates, to the contrary, that legal systems actually differ, not only in their approach and conceptual structure, but just as much in the results.

Essays addressing a variety of issues in the theory and practice of contract law.

The common law is one of two major and successful systems of law developed in Western Europe, and in one form or another is now in force not only in the country of its origin but also in the United States and large parts of the British Commonwealth and former parts of the Empire.

Contract as Promise is a study of the philosophical foundations of contract law in which Professor Fried effectively answers some of the most common assumptions about contract law and strongly proposes a moral basis for it while defending the classical theory of contract. This book provides two purposes regarding the complex legal institution of the contract. The first is the theoretical purpose to demonstrate how contract law can be traced to and is determined by a small number of basic moral principles. At the theory level the author shows that contract law does have an underlying, and unifying structure. The second is a pedagogic purpose to provide for students the underlying structure of contract law. At this level of doctrinal exposition the author shows that structure can be referred to moral principles. Together the two purposes support each other in an effective and comprehensive study of contract law. This second edition retains the original text, and includes a new Preface. It also includes a substantial new essay entitled Contract as Promise in the Light of Subsequent Scholarship--Especially Law and Economics which serves as a retrospective of the work accomplished in the last thirty years, while responding to present and future work in the field.

Civil law and common law systems are held to enforce promises differently: civil law, in principle, will enforce any promise, while common law will enforce only those with 'consideration'. In that respect, modern civil law supposedly differs from the Roman law from which it descended, where a promise was enforced depending on the type of contract the parties had made. This 2001 volume is concerned with the extent to which these characterizations are true, and how these and other differences affect the enforceability of promises. Beginning with a concise history of these distinctions, the volume then considers how twelve European legal systems would deal with fifteen concrete situations. Finally, a comparative section considers why legal systems enforce certain promises and not others, and what promises should be enforced. This is the second completed project of The Common Core of European Private Law launched at the University of Trento.