Taking Stewart Macaulay and Hugh Collins seriously

Abstract

The debate over the role of contract law in commerce has reached an impasse with leading scholars seemingly mesmerised by instrumental understandings of contract law. This article will examine recent contributions to the debate by Robert Scott, David Campbell, Catherine Mitchell and Jonathan Morgan and show how this instrumentalist bias distorts their understanding of the relationship between contract law and commerce. It will be argued that scholarship in this field will only progress by taking seriously the lessons taught by Stewart Macaulay and Hugh Collins on the role of contracts and contract law in the market.