Law Commons^™

The Correspondence Of Contract And Promise, Jody S. Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

Correspondence accounts of the relationship between contract and promise hold either that contract law is justified to the extent it enforces a corresponding moral responsibility for a promise or unjustified to the extent it undermines promissory morality by refusing to enforce a corresponding moral responsibility for a promise. In this Article, I claim that contract scholars have mistakenly presumed that they can assess the correspondence between contract and promise without first providing a theory of self-imposed moral responsibility that explains and justifies the promise principle. I argue that any plausible theory of self-imposed moral responsibility is inconsistent with a strong …