The Economic Basis of Damages for Breach of Contract

IN many respects, the common law of contract failed to survive the industrial revolution. It is now applied only in the interstices among specialized statutory and judge-made rules dealing with specific contract types.' And business now often prefers informal understandings to formal contracts.2 Perhaps the decline is the result of increases in the variousness of commercial transactions or in the costs and delays of judicial procedure. Nonetheless one is tempted first to examine the body of law itself. If that law has become ambiguous or economically irrational it must accept some of the blame for its own demise.