BOOKS The Resurrection of Contract

In a series of lectures in 1970,' Professor Grant Gilmore pronounced the death of contract. The announcement heralded a renaissance in contract scholarship. The renaissance has reached maturity: in the past two years no less than four major books have been published on contract, and these books do not exhaust the multitudinous positions on contract that have been espoused in the law reviews, economic journals, and other books in the decade since Gilmore wrote the obituary. 3 Intellectual curiosity might explain this spate of scholarly energy.4 At its death contract law, while not aged as legal doctrines go, constituted a fully and elegantly articulated set of rules that had played a central role in the modern conception of law. Henry Maine had argued that the history of law was the history of the movement from status to contract. The pedagogical method that still dominates legal education had been spawned by contract.0 Two great treatises 7 had rationalized the mass of judicial decisions; fifty American jurisdictions had adopted a single codification of those decisions.8