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Contracts Symposium Issue: Featured Speaker: The Right To Contract As A Civil Right, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The "right to contract," whether originating in the Constitution, common law, or natural law, has been long and widely felt to be in tension with our civil rights, broadly conceived. The individual himself, we generally believe, and only the individual, should decide the scope and terms of his affirmative, voluntary, and other-regarding undertakings. When he does so through contract, the individual and only the individual should determine the terms under which he will perform those duties. The civil rights laws of the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries, and the various rights they create interfere with these natural freedoms.

So, …