Contract Law and Legal Methods

The book proposes a fundamentally new way of teaching contract law: it simultaneously presents a more systematic and coherent elaboration of contract doctrine than other contacts casebooks and develops a more rigorous interdisciplinary approach to thinking about law generally. The aim of the book is to present a doctrinally integrated, interdisciplinary approach to contract law in a rigorous, open, and systematic fashion. This casebook replaces the conventional approach with an effort to elaborate the doctrinal structure of contract law in an orderly way and, at the same time, to introduce students in a systematic way to a wide range of methods of legal analysis. The materials in the book therefore present a holistic account of contract law, in which doctrines from various areas of the law are linked together, and the relations among them explained. The explanations sound both in traditional doctrinal legal analysis and in ideas taken from economics, sociology, and philosophy.