Judicial Law Reform in the Law of Contract

For all its stability the law of contract has seen a good deal of reform, most of it judge-made, in the last quarter century or so. In this 1988 paper the author tries to sketch at least some of the main features of this judicial law reform in the law of contracts, to suggest the areas where this reform has been a success and where it has been less so, and, at the end, to ask what this overall picture tells us about the process of judicial law reform in the common law. This paper will touch on a number of areas of contract in the order in which they would come up in a conventional first year contracts course