Mutuality of Obligation in Contract Law

No field of law study, certainly none in the first-year curriculum, is richer in leitmotif than is that of contracts. Much of the challenge to the beginning student lies in untangling these recurrent themes, such as bargain, reasonable expectations and reliance, to take but a few. In the following pages I shall attempt to unravel one such theme that is of contemporary significance in the development of contract law-that of mutuality of obligation. The principle of mutuality of obligation can be simply stated: If two parties are to be bound by an exchange of promises, neither one is bound until the other is bound. We are going to look at the erosion of this principle in modern contract law. But first, a little whimsy may provide some insight into the principle itself. Let your imagination carry you back over a century to Friday, June 12, 1874

Contracts during the Half-Century between Restatements

In May of 1979, as the sobering seventies drew to a close, I had the privilege of presenting to the membership of the American Law Institute the final chapter of Restatement Second of Contracts. The three volumes of that Restatement have now been published. I shall not hazard a guess as to how it will fare over the next fifty years. I would like instead to use the time we have together to reflect on what has happened in the law of contracts over the course of the half century between the two contracts Restatements- roughly 1930 to 1980