ABSTRACT
The word public policy did not appear until the eighteenth-century in common law. The politicization of the doctrine of public policy provoked the resistance and hesitation of nineteenth-century common law. W. S. W. Knight noted, the eighteenth century reshaped the doctrine of public policy as something distinct from bare immorality or illegality. Courts gradually employed the category of public policy as separate from illegality in contract law, holding that if a contract is against public policy, it is not void, yet it is unenforceable. In the literature, Percy H. Winfield has provided a basic definition for the concept of public policy: 'a principle of judicial legislation or interpretation founded on the current needs of the community', Roscoe Pound was the first scholar to provide a taxonomy of public policy under the rubric of social interests. Gellhorn's piece marks the start of the American approach to the doctrine of public policy.
