The Choice Theory of Contracts

This concise landmark in law and jurisprudence offers the first coherent, liberal account of contract law. The Choice Theory of Contracts answers the field's most pressing questions: what is the 'freedom' in 'freedom of contract'? What core values animate contract law and how do those values interrelate? How must the state act when it shapes contract law? Hanoch Dagan and Michael Heller - two of the world's leading private law theorists - show exactly why and how freedom matters to contract law. They start with the most appealing tenets of modern liberalism and end with their implications for contract law. This readable, engaging book gives contract scholars, teachers, and students a powerful normative vocabulary for understanding canonical cases, refining key doctrines, and solving long-standing puzzles in the law.

Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Autonomy as a Contract Value: 1. The challenge of autonomy; 2. Promise theory; 3. Transfer theory; 4. Recovering autonomy; Part II. The Goods of Contract: 5. Utility; 6. Community; Part III. The Choice Theory of Contracts: 7. Contractual freedom; 8. How contract values relate; 9. Contract spheres; 10. Contract types; 11. Market for new types; 12. Choice theory in practice; Conclusion; Notes; Index.

Hanoch Dagan is one of the world's leading private law theorists. He is the Stewart and Judy Colton Professor of Legal Theory and Innovation and former dean of the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. Dagan has written five books across the landscape of private law topics and has published over seventy articles in major law reviews and journals. His most recent book is Reconstructing American Legal Realism and Rethinking Private Law Theory (2013).
Michael Heller is one of America's leading authorities on property. He is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of Real Estate Law and former Vice Dean for Intellectual Life at Columbia Law School. In The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives (2008), Heller sets out a market paradox that he discovered: private ownership usually creates wealth, but too much ownership has the opposite effect - it creates gridlock.