Contract
idea · 4 works · 7 mentions · 10 anchored passages
contracts · Contracts · acts of exchange · confidence in contracts · free agreement of individuals · the conception of Contract · verbal contracts
in the texts
Ancient Law
The free agreement of individuals that increasingly determines legal relations in place of family-derived status.
If then we employ Status, agreeably with the usage of the best writers, to signify these personal conditions only, and avoid applying the term to such conditions as are the immediate or remote result of agreement, we may say that the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.
Nor is it difficult to see what is the tie between man and man which replaces by degrees those forms of reciprocity in rights and duties which have their origin in the Family.
Contracts are therefore now severed from Conveyances, and the first stage in their history is accomplished, but still they are far enough from that epoch of their development when the promise of the contractor has a higher sacredness than the formalities with which it is coupled.
Lectures on the Early History of Institutions
The legal concept of contract as developed and limited in the Brehon law tracts.
and we may probably credit the Church with the comparatively advanced development of another conception which we find here—the conception of a Contract.
Let me now observe that one or two others of the great Roman contracts appear to me, when closely examined, to afford evidence of their having been gradually evolved through changes in the mechanism of primitive society.
The Rights of War and Peace
The general concept of exchange agreements between parties, central to the whole passage
In all contracts, natural justice requires that there should be an equality of terms:
The feudal system too might be considered as a train of mixed contracts.
All acts beneficial to others, except those that are purely gratuitous, come under the denomination of contracts.
Areopagiticus
The legal and social trust that makes lending and mutual support possible.
and that they did not in trying others seek to make it safe for themselves to disobey the law, but were indeed more severe on defaulters than were the injured themselves, since they believed that those who break down confidence in contracts do a greater injury to the poor than to the rich;
For they saw that in cases of contract the judges were not in the habit of indulging their sense of equity but were strictly faithful to the laws;
And so because of this confidence no one tried to conceal his wealth nor hesitated to lend it out, but, on the contrary, the wealthy were better pleased to see men borrowing money than paying it back;