The Transformation of Contract Law from Classical to Modern

Abstract

From the middle of the nineteenth century until the first part of the twentieth century contract law was dominated by a school of thought now known as classical contract law. Over the last seventy or eighty years contract law has been transformed from classical to modern. One area of transformation concerns the nature of contract-law reasoning. Reasoning in classical contract law was formal: social propositions played little or no role. In contrast, the objective of modern contract law is to craft rules that are justified by social propositions or, to put it differently, are normatively desirable. The transformation from classical to modern contract law can also be observed through examination of four spectra along which contract-law doctrines can be ranged: from objectivity to subjectivity, from standardization to individualization, from the static to the dynamic, and from binary to multifaceted rules.