Fordham Law School FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History Faculty Scholarship 2019 Voluntary Obligation and Contract Aditi Bagchi Fordham University Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Contracts Commons Recommended Citation Aditi Bagchi, Voluntary Obligation and Contract, 20 Theoretical Inquiries in L. 433 (2019) Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/faculty_scholarship/994 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. 433 Voluntary Obligation and Contract Aditi Bagchi* Absent mistake or misrepresentation, most scholars assume that parties who agree to contract do so voluntarily. Scholars tend further to regard that choice as an important exercise in moral agency. Hanoch Dagan and Michael Heller are right to question the quality of our choices. Where the fundamental contours of the transaction are legally determined, parties have little opportunity to exercise autonomous choice over the terms on which they deal with others. To the extent that our choices in contract do not reflect our individual moral constitutions — our values, virtues, vices, the set of reasons we reject and the set of reasons we endorse — we are not justified in regulating contracts reluctantly. Contracts are entitled to the privilege of liberal regulatory deference only to the extent that they are the work product of individual autonomy.