ither
personal or corporate disability are less frequent than they were. In
any case they stand apart from the general principles which characterize
our law of contract.

Contract and property.

The rights created by contract are personal rights against the promisors
and their legal representatives, and therefore different in kind from
the rights of ownership and the like which are available against all the
world. Nevertheless they may be and very commonly are capable of
pecuniary estimation and estimated as part of a man's assets. Book debts
are the most obvious example. Such rights are property in the larger
sense: they are in modern law transmissible and alienable, unless the
contract is of a kind implying personal confidence, or a contrary
intention is otherwise shown. The rights created by negotiable
instruments are an important and unique species of property, being not
only exchangeable but the very staple of commercial currency. Contract
and conveyance, again, are distinct in their nature, and sharply
distinguished in the classical Roman law. But in the common law property
in goods is transferred by a complete contract of sale without any
further act, and under the French civil code and systems which have
followed it a like rule applies not only to movables but to immovables.
In English law procuring a man to break his contract is a civil wrong
against the other contracting party, subject to exceptions which are
still not clearly defined.

AUTHORITIES.--History: Ames, "The History of Assumpsit," _Harvard Law
Rev._ ii. 1, 53 (Cambridge, Mass. 1889); Pollock and Maitland,
_History of English Law_, 2nd ed., ii. 184-239 (Cambridge, 1898).
Modern: Pollock, article "Contract" in _Encyclopaedia of the Laws of
England_ (2nd ed., London, 1907), a technical summary of the modern
law; the same writer's edition of the Indian Contract Act (assisted
by D. F. Mulla, London and Bombay, 1905) restates and discusses the
principles of the common law besides commenting on the provisions of
the Act in detail. Of the text-books, Anson, _English Law of
Contract_, reached an eleventh edition in 1906; Harriman, _Law of
Contracts_ (second edition, 1901); Leake, _Principles of the Law of
Contract_ (fifth edition by Randall, 1906); Pollock, _Principles of
Contract_ (eighth edition, 1910, third American edition, Wald's
completed by Williston, New York, 1906). O. W. Holmes's (justice of
the