Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2017

Abstract

Relational contract scholarship is at a pivot point. On the one hand, the relationalist revival that has dominated contracts scholarship for almost half a century may be on the wane. Relational contract scholarship has evolved during this period into separate, and often dueling, intellectual traditions. One camp consists of scholars who are typically associated with the “law and economics” movement; in the other camp are scholars who more readily identify with the “law and society” tradition. While relationalists have been quarreling with each other, a younger cohort of law and economics scholars, armed with impressive technical skills, have abandoned relational questions in favor of projects that are capable of being analyzed through formal models or sophisticated empirical techniques. In turn, many other of the brightest stars in contract are formally trained in analytic philosophy and focus their energies on classical contract doctrine and the extent to which it adheres to deontological principles grounded in Kantian notions of autonomy. At its best, this new contracts scholarship is analytically elegant and generates counter-intuitive insights. But its analytical rigor requires strong simplifying assumptions. As a consequence, the bulk of this work is a far remove from the complex environment of relational contracting.

Disciplines

Contracts | Law

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Download

Included in

Contracts Commons

Share

COinS