Calculating Promises : The Emergence of Modern American Contract Doctrine.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Calculating Promises -- Introduction The Imagined Individual at the Borders of Contract -- Gifts and Promises Revisited -- The Revolution in Consideration Doctrine -- The Gift Beyond the Grave: Case Law -- Responding to Revolution Moving Gifts and Consideration Through the Twentieth Century -- Speculating on Gifts and Promises -- Speculations of Contract -- Distinguished Gambles The Struggle to Separate Speculation and Insurance from Gambling -- "Contracts" for "Futures" Commercial Speculation and the Gambling Stigma -- Wagering in Lives The Life Insurance Speculators -- Acquisitive Individuality Versus Communal Efficiency Conflicting Policies and the Love- Hate Relationship with Risk -- The Narratives of Incomplete Contracts -- Framing Incomplete Contracts -- The Use and Abuse of Historical Narrative Debates over Incomplete Contracts -- Evaluating the Frame of Incompleteness Discourse -- Conclusion Undermining the Metaphysics of Contract -- Index.

This history of American contract law argues that late nineteenth-century legal scholars revolutionized doctrine by establishing calculating promisors as the centerpiece of their conception of contract, a conception still widely held today.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.