Law Commons^™

Modern Unilateral Contracts, Mark Pettit

Faculty Scholarship

Why would anyone write about unilateral contracts today? After all, Karl Llewellyn argued convincingly more than forty years ago' that unilateral contracts are rare and unimportant and should be relegated to the "freak tent. ' 2 Academics, he said, created the "Great Dichotomy" between unilateral and bilateral contracts; lack of support for the unilateral contract idea in the cases required those academics to illustrate the concept with ridiculous hypotheticals about climbing greased flagpoles and crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. The drafters of the Second Restatement of Contracts thus considered it a step forward when they not only minimized the importance of …