A Theory of Contract Law

In the past few decades, scholars have offered positive, normative, and most recently, interpretive theories of contract law. These theories have proceeded primarily (indeed, necessarily) from deontological and consequentialist premises. In A Theory of Contract Law: Empirical Insights and Moral Psychology, Professor Peter A. Alces confronts the leading interpretive theories of contract and demonstrates their doctrinal failures. Professor Alces presents the leading canonical cases that inform the extant theories of Contract law in both their historical and transactional contexts and argues that moral psychology provides a better explanation for the contract doctrine than do alternative comprehensive interpretive approaches.

Peter A. Alces is the Rita Anne Rollins Professor of Law at The College of William and Mary, where he has taught since 1990. He practiced with the commercial group of the Chicago office of Sidley & Austin, before entering teaching in 1983. Prior to joining the William and Mary faculty, Professor Alces taught at the University of Alabama School of Law. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas, Washington and Lee University, and University of Illinois law schools, and during the 1987-88 and 2008-09 academic years he visited at the Washington University School of Law. Professor Alces is the author (or co-author) of ten books on commercial law topics, including casebooks (published by West, Matthew Bender, and Lexis-Nexis) and treatises (published by Little Brown (now Aspen), Warren, Gorham & Lamont (now Thomson-West), and Callaghan (now Thomson-West). His articles and essays have appeared in leading journals, including the California (Berkeley), Northwestern, Georgetown, Texas, Michigan, Illinois, Washington University, Emory, and Minnesota law reviews.