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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Unity And Pluralism In Contract Law, Nathan Oman
Unity And Pluralism In Contract Law, Nathan Oman
Michigan Law Review
It is a cliché of contemporary legal scholarship that, in the last few decades, the study of law has witnessed a vast proliferation of competing theoretical approaches. The old faith in the careful honing of doctrinal concepts and the essential usefulness of legal analysis has given way to a cacophony of competing theoretical sects. Economists, moral philosophers, sociologists, historians, and others have stepped forward to offer the insights of this or that discipline as a new and superior path to legal enlightenment. Perhaps nowhere has this cliché been truer than in the realm of contracts scholarship, where, for a generation, …
Duty And Consequence: A Non-Conflating Theory Of Promise And Contract, Jeffrey Marc Lipshaw
Duty And Consequence: A Non-Conflating Theory Of Promise And Contract, Jeffrey Marc Lipshaw
ExpressO
I argue that the debate between deontologists and consequentialists of contract law conflates and therefore unduly confuses the analysis of each of them. The debate is a reprise of the conflation of reason and knowledge. Present-day legal consequentialists see reason (pure or practical) as unhelpful or worse. Pragmatism, if anything, rules the day. But the present-day rationalists fare no better, seeking to make constitutive claims of knowledge on the basis of reason. Hence the concept of contract as promise has been subject to the criticism that it fails as an explanation of the law (versus an exposition of how our …