Introducing our Virtual Symposium: Revisiting the Contracts Scholarship of Stewart Macaulay

This symposium marks the publication of Revisiting the Contracts Scholarship of StewartMacaulay: On the Empirical and the Lyrical (Hart Publishing 2013), avolume edited by Jean Braucher, John Kidwell, and William C. Whitford.  Starting next week and continuing for severalweeks, this blog will publish entries both by contributors to the book and byothers who have engaged with Macaulay’s work in the field of contracts.

Fifty years ago, the American Sociological Review publishedMacaulay’s Non-Contractual  Relations in Business—A Preliminary Study,an empirical examination of the use and, more strikingly, the non-use ofcontracts in business.  One of the 20most cited articles in the history of ASR, its influence has grown with eachpassing decade.  Macaulay (pictured) has produced animpressive number of other significant articles in contract law, as well asinfluential work in law and social science, and is the lead author of thecasebook, Contracts: Law in Action, Vol.I and II (LexisNexis 3^rd Ed. 2010/2011), co-authored byBraucher, Kidwell, and Whitford (introduction available here). 

“Bill Whitford, the late John Kidwell, and I wanted tocelebrate Macaulay’s contributions to contracts scholarship, particularly hisuse of law in action and relational perspectives,” explains Jean Braucher,Roger C. Henderson Professor of Law at the University of Arizona.  “We were extremely pleased that leading andrising scholars contributed 15 original chapters to the book, everything fromtheoretical essays to new empirical work to relational critiques of legaldoctrine.”  Braucher adds that Kidwell,who died in 2012, participated fully in the development of the book and editedseveral of the chapters.

Kidwell, Whitford, and Macaulay all served for many years onthe faculty at the Wisconsin Law School, where the law in action approach is atradition.  Whitford and Macaulay are both emeritusprofessors there. Macaulay, who joined the Wisconsin law faculty in 1957, hasheld two named professorships there, serving as the Malcolm Pitman SharpProfessor and Theodore W. Brazeau Professor of Law.

Revisiting the Contracts Scholarshipof Stewart Macaulay begins with Non-ContractualRelations in Business, reproduced in full, and then provides extendedexcerpts from two other significant articles by Macaulay, Private Legislation and the Duty to Read—Business Run by IBM Machine,the Law of Contracts and Credit Cards (1966) and The Real Deal and the Paper Deal: Empirical Pictures of Relationships,Complexity and the Urge for Transparent Simple Rules (2003).  The book also includes 15 chapters written byother scholars, Brian H. Bix, David Campbell, Jay M.Feinman, Robert W. Gordon, Claire A. Hill, Charles L. Knapp, Ethan J. Lieb,Li-Wen Lin, Deborah Waire Post, Edward Rubin, Carol Sanger, Robert E. Scott, D.Gordon Smith, Josh Whitford, John Wightman, and William J. Woodward, Jr.  The book’s table of contents andpreface are available here (giving the title and author of each chapter, briefly describing each chapter,and providing an overview of Macaulay’s career and contributions to contractsteaching).

[JT]