UNLOCKING GOLANG AND JAVA MASTERY FOR INTERMEDIATE PROGRAMMERS: YOUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO INTERMEDIATE PROGRAMMING MASTERY AND UNLEASHING THE POWER OF ADVANCED JAVA TECHNIQUES - 2 BOOKS IN 1 Peterson
Senior Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
The Honorable Drew S. Days III
Alfred M. Rankin Professor Emeritus and Professorial Lecturer in Law, Yale Law School, and Former Solicitor General of the United States
James H. Carter Senior Counsel, WilmerHale, New York
The Honorable Harry T. Edwards
Senior Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
Michael Greco
Of Counsel, K&L Gates LLP, and Former President, American Bar Association
Richard H. Helmholz, Ruth Wyatt Rosenson Distinguished Service Professor of Law The University of Chicago Law School
Mary Kay Kane Chancellor and Dean Emerita University of California, Hastings College of the Law
Lance Liebman
William S. Beinecke Professor of Law, Columbia University Law School, and Director Emeritus, American Law Institute
Kent McKeever Director, Diamond Law Library, Columbia University Law School
Alberto J. Mora
Senior Fellow, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard University and Former General Counsel, United States Navy
Joseph W. Singer Bussey Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Michael Traynor President Emeritus, American Law Institute
Stephen M. Sheppard, Chair
Dean and Charles E. Cantú Distinguished Professor of Law, St. Mary’s University School of Law
The Oxford Commentaries on American Law:
An Introduction to the Series
Welcome to The Oxford Commentaries on American Law. In this series, Oxford University Press promotes the revival of the art of the American legal treatise by publishing careful, scholarly books that refine the laws of the United States, synthesizing them for the bench, for the bar, for the student, and for the citizen—while providing a foundation for future scholarship and refinement.
The treatise, sometimes called the commentary or, in its elementary form, the hornbook, is the most traditional of law books. Written for use by lawyers, judges, teachers, and students, the treatise is a source of law in itself. From the Roman Institutes of Gaius and for Justinian, through the great volumes on English law called the Glanville and Bracton, to the Institutes of Sir Edward Coke and the Commentaries of Sir William Blackstone, and even to their criticisms in the manuals and codes of Jeremy Bentham, treatises were—along with case reports and statutory collections—both a repository and a source of the law.
This was true in the United States throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, when the treatise was the dominant law book for the mastery of any given field. Great lawyers— the likes of Joseph Story, James Kent, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Henry Wigmore, William Prosser, and Allan Farnsworth—wrote elegant books that surveyed the law from a unique perspective and that were read and quoted by judges, lawyers, and scholars. These books were studied by generations of students, who consulted them anew throughout their legal careers. They remain essential to understanding American law. Yet in the last decades of the 1900s, as the law book marketplace changed, treatises became less fashionable in the U.S.
Treatises remain significant to the legal systems of Europe, Asia, and South America, as well as in some specific fields of U.S. law. However, the general need for new ideas in U.S. law to incorporate changes and answer new questions has hardly grown less. Thus, the need persists for clarification in the law by careful analysts seeking to define the most useful and balanced approaches to legal rules as applied to specific situations. The purpose of such analysis is to organize, explain, and apply the most significant sources in a field of closely related laws, rather than to account for every single decision or variation in it. The treatise is therefore a tool to describe rules and principles in the law and to organize them for applications to specific situations, in answer to questions in the law that are likely to arise. These principles and rules are derived sometimes from the statements and texts of legislators and regulators, sometimes from the practices of judges, lawyers, and officials, sometimes from the context of older legal customs, and sometimes from the logic and justice that bind the law, as understood by the author of the treatise. Treatise authors work within a tradition to create a new source of law, like Sir Edward Coke said, “bringing new corn from old fields.”
It is my great pleasure to work, not only with the authors of these books, but also with a world class staff of professionals in the English and North American offices of Oxford University Press, and with an outstanding editorial board. I am grateful to each of you for your care and persistence in developing this grand initiative.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Eisenberg, Melvin Aron, author.
Title: Foundational principles of contract law/Melvin A. Eisenberg.
Description: New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. | Series: The Oxford commentaries on American law | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018000342 | ISBN 9780199731404 ((hardback): alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Contracts—United States. | Contracts.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000342
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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
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To Helen, Bronwyn, the memory of David, and Lia
About the Author
Melvin A. Eisenberg is the Jesse H. Choper Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley Law).
After graduating from Harvard Law School summa cum laude, Eisenberg was with the New York firm of Kaye Scholer Fierman Hays & Handler. He also served as assistant counsel to the President’s commission on the assassination of President Kennedy (Warren Commission) and as assistant corporations counsel of New York City. He joined the Boalt faculty in 1966.
Eisenberg is the author of The Nature of the Common Law (1991) and The Structure of the Corporation (1997) and has published casebooks on contracts and corporations. He was Chief Reporter of the American Law Institute’s Principles of Corporate Governance, an Adviser to the Institute’s Restatement Third of Agency, Restatement of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment, and a member of the American Bar Association’s Corporate Law Committee. He is presently an Adviser to the Institute’s Restatement of Consumer Contracts. From 1991 to 1993 he held the American Law Institute’s Justice R. Ami Cutter Chair. He was a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 1969, at the University of Tokyo in 1992, and at Columbia Law School from 1998 to 2009. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Senior Scholar. He holds honorary Doctor of Law degrees from Cologne University and the University of Milan
In 1984 Eisenberg delivered the Cooley Lectures at the University of Michigan. He has also given lectures at a number of universities in the United States, Germany, Italy, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. In 1990 he was awarded the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award.
A. Cases in Which Reliance Consists of Necessary Performance or Preparation
B. Cases in Which Expectation Damages Are Invariant to Reliance
IV. Cases in Which Overreliance, Although Theoretically Possible, Is Very Unlikely
B. Cases Where It Would Be Inefficient for a Buyer to Take the Seller’s Probability of
