THE PROMISE AND THE LAW—PART I: ESTABLISHING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PROMISE KEEPING AND CONTRACT LAW

Authors

Ben Tice

Abstract

Many accounts of contract law are promise based, however, these accounts fail to treat The Promise as a tangible social institution. Also, legal realist and law and economic accounts of contract law fail to acknowledge that The Promise exists at all. Using scholarship from political economy, this Article shows that The Promise and contract law are distinct entities. This differs from promissory accounts which treat contracts as a subspecies of promises. This gap in the scholarship matters because the existence of The Promise raises important normative considerations that existing accounts cannot accommodate by failing to address the existence of The Promise.

Recommended Citation

Ben Tice, THE PROMISE AND THE LAW—PART I: ESTABLISHING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PROMISE KEEPING AND CONTRACT LAW, 46 W. New Eng. L. Rev. 283 (2024), https://digitalcommons.law.wne.edu/lawreview/vol46/iss3/3