Contractual obligation

Abstract

The aim of present article is to lay out the usual legal and moral enquiries to which a theory of contract –and its deontic equivalent, promise– leads. We can assess this dual nature of legal obligations even in classic Roman Law times, but it is not until the 80s that the issue has experienced a second academic life. With the sudden rise of scholarship around the so-called death of contract, theorists on the subject have discussed if would not be more convenient to reabsorb the general theory of contract as an independent discipline within tort law, reducing in this exercise its moral component. Charles Fried’s and Patrick Atiyah’s work vindicating a strong moral commitment in legal theory and practice through the underlying idea of promise has left opened the trail to contemporary debate and offered an alternative to the otherwise successful economic theory of contract.