Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2014 Contract Theory – Who Needs It? Avery W. Katz Columbia Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Contracts Commons Recommended Citation Avery W. Katz, Contract Theory – Who Needs It?, 81 U. CHI. L. REV. 2043 (2014). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/605 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Contract Theory-Who Needs It? Avery W. Katzt Reconstructing Contracts Douglas G. Baird. Harvard, 2013. 170 pages. Contract Law: Rules, Theory, and Context Brian H. Bix. Cambridge, 2012. 202 pages. FoundationalPrinciples of Contract Law Melvin A. Eisenberg. Oxford, forthcoming. INTRODUCTION Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be un- derstood backward. But then one forgets the other clause- that it must be lived forward. Soren Kierkegaardl Both law students and law teachers have traditionally been drawn to conceptual projects that attempt to systematize the field of contract law. The reasons for this are easy to see: the field is doctrinally complex, few beginning students have any substantial experience with the kinds of fact patterns that arise in the cases, and the law is a locus of contestation over funda- mental issues of economic liberalism that go to the heart of the capitalist system. Thus, there has long been both an appetite and a market for syntheses of the field that go beyond the usual study aids and hornbooks.