ABSTRACT
Paul Bohannan observed that “more scholarship has probably gone into defining and explaining the concept of ‘law’ than into any other concept in central use in the social sciences”. Contracts may be familiar features of everyday life, but of course not every relationship is contractual. A legal contract is much more than a promise: It is an enforceable promise. In essence, contracts transform the nature of the resources held by those who sign them. The concept of contract is important because law is viewed as itself a type of contract, namely, a civil contract. Law is the articulation of expectations about the rights and duties of the parties to the contract. The idea of a contract writ large is hardly a new one; in fact, the notion of “social contract” is one that dominated political philosophy for generations and has been more recently reinvoked by J. Rawls.
