Whether or not ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’, access to money is the root of much enterprise. Ideally, banks should channel savings into investment. Banks make loans, and so have huge influence on economic activity. If banks give more credit, people spend more money. If everyone spends money wisely, if more people are productively employed and the supply of goods and services expands proportionally, this creates beneficial economic development. But if more people spend (without improving productivity) and the supply of goods and services does not expand, the increased competition for limited resources will result in inflation: price rises, relative to people’s income or wealth.

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’.