This essay is a review of The Richness of Contract Law: An Analysis and Critique of Conemporary Theories of Contract Law by Robert A. Hillman (1997).
Throughout the book, Hillman offers a number of useful insights about various issues of contract law and theory--as he has in his numerous law review articles--but in this review the author is concerned with his overall theme: a general skepticism about  unifying  or  highly abstract  contract theories that fail to mirror the richness of contract law. In this regard, Hillman stands in the  realist  tradition of the previous generation of contracts scholars. Hillman attempts to justify this stance by examining a number of doctrinal contexts: contract formation, unconscionability, and good faith. Hillman considers a variety of theoretical approaches: promise theorists, reliance theorists, feminist theorists, efficiency theorists, relational theorists, and critical legal scholars

Barnett, Randy E

English

When I teach the doctrine of good faith performance, I assign an exchange between two distinguished contracts scholars, Robert Summers and Steven Burton, that has come to be known as the  Summers-Burton  debate. This debate is interesting not only for the contrasting views of its protagonists concerning the doctrine of good faith, but also because of the generational shift in modes of scholarship it represents. In the 1950s and 1960s, contracts scholars, like so many others, rejected so-called  conceptualist  or  formalist  approaches that attempted to dictate the outcome of cases with general concepts and rules. Contracts scholarship was dominated by supposedly  realist  inquiries into the complexities of actual commercial practice, inquiries which sought to identify the multiple factors or considerations that judges do or should take into account when deciding cases. Usually it was denied that these factors could or should be weighted or organized in some manner in advance of a legal dispute. Any effort to reduce the vast complexity of the real world of commercial practice to some verbal formula was dismissed as  reductionist  or  simplistic

Barnett, Randy E.

bepress Legal Repository