Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-kw2vx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-28T03:07:29.369Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

12 - The Death of Contract

Dodos and Unicorns or Sleeping Rattlesnakes?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2011

By
Stewart Macaulay
Edited by
Robert W. Gordon  and
Morton J. Horwitz
Stewart Macaulay
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Robert W. Gordon
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Morton J. Horwitz
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

Just because we are amazed by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, we should not overlook the charm of his First. In something of the same spirit, I have been charged with commenting on Lawrence Friedman's first book, Contract Law in America, which was published in 1965. Friedman now has composed many more “symphonies” than even Beethoven since this first effort, but it is instructive to turn back to the beginning.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must note that I am not a neutral detached observer. I am thanked in the preface of Contract Law in America, and two years after its publication we mixed some of the ideas in Friedman's book with some of mine and made a presentation at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting. Furthermore, one of my scholarly roles seems to be writing favorable blurbs for the back of jackets for Friedman's books, and the Friedman and Macaulay families have been close friends for more than forty-five years. Indeed, I can point to places where ideas from Contract Law in America have influenced my work. Nonetheless, even an unbiased observer should conclude that the book has had some real influence in the contracts world, and it stands up very well after forty-five years.

In Contract Law in America, Friedman looks at the contracts opinions of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin for three periods: (1) the organization of the Wisconsin Territory to the Civil War (1836–61); (2) the Progressive era in the first two decades of the twentieth century (1905–15); and (3) a time ten years after World War II (1955–58).

Type
Chapter
Information
Law, Society, and History
Themes in the Legal Sociology and Legal History of Lawrence M. Friedman
 , pp. 193 - 208
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ayres, Ian (1999). Empire or Residue: Competing Visions of the Contractual Canon, 26 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 897.Google Scholar
Braucher, Jean (1995). The Afterlife of Contract, 90 NW. U. L. Rev. 49.Google Scholar
Childres, Robert (1966). Book Review, 18 J. Legal Educ. 478.Google Scholar
Eagan, William (1980). The Westinghouse Uranium Contracts: Commercial Impracticability and Related Matters, 18 Am. Bus. L.J. 281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edelman, Lauren B. (1990). Legal Environments and Organizational Governance: The Expansion of Due Process in the American Workplace, 95 Am. Sociol. Rev. 1401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edelman, Lauren B., Abraham, Steven E., and Erlanger, Howard (1992). Professional Construction of Law: The Inflated Threat of Wrongful Discharge, 26 Law & Soc'y Rev. 47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feinman, Jay M. (1989). The Jurisprudence of Classification, 41 Stan. L. Rev. 661.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedman, Lawrence M. (1965). Contract Law in America. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Friedman, Lawrence M.. (1967). Legal Rules and the Process of Social Change, 19 Stan. L. Rev. 786.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedman, Lawrence M.. (1990). The Republic of Choice, Authority, and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Friedman, Lawrence M. and Macaulay, Stewart (1967). Contract Law and Contract Teaching: Past, Present and Future, 1967 Wis. L. Rev. 805.Google Scholar
Galanter, Marc (2001). Contract in Court; Or Almost Everything You May or May Not Want to Know about Contract Litigation, 2001 Wis. L. Rev. 577.Google Scholar
Galanter, Marc and Rogers, Joel (1991). A Transformation of American Business Disputing? Some Preliminary Observations. Madison: University of Wisconsin Institute for Legal Studies.Google Scholar
Gordon, Robert W. (1974). Book Review, 1974 Wis. L. Rev. 1216.Google Scholar
Hadfield, Gillian K. (2004). Where Have All the Trials Gone? Settlements, Nontrial Adjudications, and Statistical Artifacts in the Changing Disposition of Federal Civil Cases, 1 J. Empir. Legal Stud. 705.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, Robert W. (1966). Book Review, 59 Law Libr. J. 129.Google Scholar
Hedley, Steve (1997). The “Needs of Commercial Litigants” in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Contract Law, 18 Legal Hist. 85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henderson, Stanley D. (1975). Book Review, 124 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1466.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Ernest M. (1965–6). Book Review, 13 UCLA L. Rev. 897.Google Scholar
Jones, William C. (1967). Book Review, 1967 Wash. U. L.Q. 238.Google Scholar
Joskow, Paul L. (1977). Commercial Impossibility, the Uranium Market and the Westinghouse Case, 6 J. Legal Stud. 119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, Duncan (1976). Form and Substance in Private Law Adjudication, 89 Harv. L. Rev. 1685.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kenworthy, Lane, Macaulay, Stewart, and Rogers, Joel (1996). The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: Business Litigation and Governance in the American Automobile Industry, 21 Law & Soc. Inquiry631.Google Scholar
Kim, Pauline T. (1999). Norms, Learning, and Law: Exploring the Influences on Workers' Legal Knowledge, 1999 U. Ill. L. Rev. 447.Google Scholar
Korobkin, Russell (2003). Bounded Rationality, Standard Form Contracts, and Unconscionability, 70 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kraus, Jody S. and Scott, Robert E. (2009). Contract Design and the Structure of Contractual Intent, 84 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1023.Google Scholar
Lim, Julian S. (2003). Tongue-tied in the Market: The Relevance of Contract Law to Racial-Language Minorities, 91 Cal. L. Rev. 579.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macaulay, Stewart (1966). Private Legislation and the Duty to Read – Business by IBM Machine, the Law of Contracts and Credit Cards, 19 Vand. L. Rev. 1051.Google Scholar
Macaulay, Stewart. (1989). Bambi Meets Godzilla: Contracts Scholarship and Teaching vs. State Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Statutes, 26 Hous. L. Rev. 575.Google Scholar
Macaulay, Stewart. (2001). Almost Everything That I Did Want to Know About Contract Litigation: A Comment on Galanter, 2001 Wis. L. Rev. 629.Google Scholar
Macaulay, Stewart. (2003). The Real and the Paper Deal: Empirical Pictures of Relationships, Complexity and the Urge for Transparent Simple Rules, 66 Mod. L. Rev. 44. This paper is also included in Campbell, David, Hugh Collins, and John Wightman, eds. (2003). Implicit Dimensions of Contract: Discrete, Relational & Network Contracts. Oxford: Hart Publishing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macaulay, Stewart et al. (2003). Contracts: Law in Action. 2nd edition. Newark, NJ: LexisNexis.Google Scholar
Maggs, Gregory E. (2003). The Waning Importance of Revisions to U.C.C. Article 2, 78 Notre Dame L. Rev. 595.Google Scholar
McBarnet, Doreen (1988). Law, Policy and Legal Avoidance: Can Law Effectively Implement Egalitarian Policies? 15 J. Law & Soc'y113.CrossRef
McBarnet, Doreen. (1991). Whiter than White Collar Crime: Tax, Fraud Insurance and the Management of Stigma, 42 Br. J. Sociol. 323.CrossRef
Nielsen, Laura Beth (1999). Paying Workers or Paying Lawyers: Employee Termination Practices in the United States and Canada, 21 Law & Pol'y247.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, Robert E. (2000a). The Uniformity Norm in Commercial Law: A Comparative Analysis of Common Law and Code Methodologies, in Kraus, Jody S. and Walt, Steven D., eds., The Jurisprudential Foundations of Corporate and Commercial Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, Robert E.. (2000b). The Case for Formalism in Relational Contract, 94 NW. U. L. Rev. 847.Google Scholar
Scott, Robert E.. (2009). In (Partial) Defense of Strict Liability in Contract, 107 Mich. L. Rev. 1381.Google Scholar
Shamir, Ronen (1993). Formal and Substantive Rationality in American Law: A Weberian Perspective, 2 Soc. & Legal Stud. 45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharp, Malcolm P. (1966). Book Review, 28 Rutgers L. Rev. 415.Google Scholar
Speidel, Richard E. (1967). Book Review, 1967 Wis. L. Rev. 301.Google Scholar
Speidel, Richard E.. (1989). Arbitration of Statutory Rights under the Federal Arbitration Act: The Case for Reform, 4 Ohio St. J. on Disp. Resol. 157.Google Scholar
Toharia, José Juan (1974). Cambio Social y Vida Juridica en España, 1900–1970. Madrid: EDICUSA.Google Scholar
Treitel, Guenter H. (1965). Book Review, 33 U. Chi. L. Rev. 418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vail, John and Osborne, Tom (2005). The Menace of Mandatory Arbitration, Trial, Aug. 2005, at 22.
Vincent-Jones, Peter (1993). Contract Litigation in England and Wales 1975–1991: A Transformation in Business Disputing?, 12 Civ. Just. Q. 337.Google Scholar
Woodward, William J., Jr. (1997). Contracts for Grown-ups, 47 J. Legal Educ. 139.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×