About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

2 Social & Legal Studies 5 (1993)

handle is hein.journals/solestu2 and id is 1 raw text is: FROM PROPERTY TO CONTRACT: POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF VALUE IN ENGLISH COMMON LAW JAMES HENRY BERGERON University College Dublin, Ireland INTRODUCTION FFER, ACCEPTANCE and consideration are the fundamental rules defining contract in the Anglo-American tradition. During the Formal- ist period in legal reasoning, these rules were applied as a non- ideological process of deduction. They still are in some law schools and casebooks. Behind the apparent doctrinal purity of contract law, however, lies a menagerie of political and economic values. The law is seldom ideologically whole; rather, contract embraces tensions wrought of the uneasy coexistence of competing philosophies. The received tradition, the basic curriculum of every LLB student, makes two fundamental assumptions. The first is that contract is not property. The two concepts are rigidly divided, both conceptually and in the organization of teaching and scholarship. Little comment is made on the historical tensions between property-based and contractual paradigms of legal relationships. Yet this eighteenth-century legal crisis was central to the creation of modern contract law. That crisis was linked to the development of the second assumption of the SOCIAL & LEGAL STmDIES (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi), Vol. 2 (1993), 5-23

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most