This chapter briefly examines contract law trends over the past 200 years or so. The chapter explores the development of the common law of contract, identifying the broad shift from the classical law of the 1800s to the neo-classical law characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century. By the second half of the twentieth century, thanks to the rise of the consumer and empirical evidence demonstrating the minor role played by contracts and contract law in business practice, the classical law model appeared to be under considerable pressure from realist and contextualist rivals that stressed the life of a contract outside its formal express terms. The shift to a more standards-based, neo-classical contract law in response to these tensions was not easily confined to consumer contracts, and there was plenty of scope for importing the broad values of ‘consumer-welfarism’ into commercial contracts. The move to a contextual method of interpretation and the willingness to relax doctrines such as consideration in response to business realities suggested further classical law disintegration. The chapter notes that this process now seems to have gone into reverse.

With nation states and international organisations, the corporation is probably the most significant ‘social institution’ in modern history. But what exactly is it? How are corporations created? Who runs them? And to what extent are they accountable in their exercise of power? Leading company law textbooks engage all of these questions.

For life to improve on Earth, energy will be clean. Electricity will come from wind, solar, hydro or geothermal sources, with battery or pump storage, and not from coal, oil or gas. Today we use electricity for light, computers, anything that plugs in. It is used for heating and transport (Chs. 14 and 15), though gas and oil remain. To electrify transport, generation must expand by 10–50 per cent, and electric heating requires more electricity again. But electricity is more efficient than fossil fuels: it consumes only a quarter of equivalent energy used in oil, and the benefits of renewable electricity go far beyond stopping climate damage.

The idea that a person’s home is their castle, that ‘its roof may shake … the storm may enter – the rain may enter – but the King of England cannot enter’, has been in law for 500 years.

This chapter explores some of the current and future pressures on contract law that are likely to reinforce its formalist and commercialist tendencies. The first of these is the recasting of contract law as a commodity that should primarily serve the interests of commercial contractors (usually by upholding the terms of the contract) at the expense of doctrinal development. The second is the declining use of adjudication to resolve disputes, rooted in lack of support for litigation and the emphasis on non-adjudicative dispute resolution within courts themselves. The third factor is the increasing automation of contract processes, manifest in the development of ‘smart contracts’ and algorithmic contracting. These innovations are likely to require revision of the foundational understandings upon which contract law is built, notably around how contracts are created, by whom and for what purposes.

Even ‘if your aim is not to understand all of law’s effects on corporate activities but only to grasp the basic legal ‘constitution’ or make-up of the modern corporation’, wrote the former Dean of Harvard Law School, ‘you must, at the very least, also gain a working knowledge of labor law’.

‘ou sIf yeek economic growth, if you seek opportunity, if you seek social justice and human dignity’, said George W. Bush as the economy collapsed in 2008, ‘the free market system is the way to go.’ The problem is, the ‘free market’ is based (unlike its ideology) on binding public norms. Markets result from many people interacting in the light of the law. Trust and good faith, for confidence in doing business, come from rule-based institutions, not some free-for-all.

In this book’s introduction, the thesis was proposed that enterprise law can be regarded as a coherent subject. It is a preferable framework to understand the economic constitution and human rights than systems which artificially segregate corporate, labour, competition or insolvency from one another, and each from public policy. On the contrary, the investor, worker, consumer, creditor and member of the public is often the same person. Dividing these actors against themselves is a diversion from unaccountable corporate power.

Theories of enterprise law go to the heart of economics, politics and a just society. First, there are ‘positive’ theories that explain how the world works. For example, a positive theory might argue that labour rights raise employment and productivity, and reduce inequality (see Ch. 5), or that public healthcare gives longer life than privatised or insurance health systems (see Ch. 90). As in natural science, social science frames hypotheses, develops methods for testing the hypotheses, finds results and draws conclusions.

Throughout his long career, Jeremy Bentham wrote on law and politics both domestic and international. His first co-publication was a pamphlet on the American Revolution, and throughout his later writings, the emancipation of nations from the Ottoman, Spanish, and Portuguese Empires was a main concern.1 In all periods of his work, Bentham commented on questions of foreign policy, on border-crossing political economy, on the atrocities committed in war and colonial settlement, and on international law as part of an all-comprehensive legal code. But although his writings are routinely celebrated, following John Stuart Mill, for ‘their cosmopolitan character’,2 there exists no consensus on what exactly his contribution to the cosmopolitan canon is. This may be the reason why, in marked contrast to the popularity of Immanuel Kant’s writings on the same topic, which continue to inform and shape today’s approaches in political theory,3 there exist few systematic attempts to link Bentham’s imputed cosmopolitan attitude to contemporary debates. This is a serious lacuna in the literature, given that Bentham’s legal and political thought, and especially his global political thought, have attracted genuine and detailed interest in recent decades.

As Chapter 6 explored, competition is meant to benefit consumers and the public, because people exercise choice and influence over what is produced. Enterprises producing what people want often get more business. But competitions also have ‘losers’, and all too much losing means insolvency. ‘Enterprises live (and sometimes die) by credit’, and corporate insolvency, like individuals’ bankruptcy, is an inability to pay debts.