romise
itself. This has been demonstrated abundantly by experience of suits
in equity to enforce oral contracts taken out of the Statute of Frauds
by great hardship and part performance.

Revived philosophical jurisprudence has its first and perhaps its
greatest opportunity in the Anglo-American law of contracts. The
constantly increasing list of theoretical anomalies shows that
analysis and restatement can avail us no longer. Indeed the lucid
statement of Williston but emphasizes the inadequacy of analysis even
when eked out by choice from among competing views and analytical
restatements of judicial dogma in the light of results. Projects for
"restatement of the law" are in the air. But a restatement of what
has never been stated is an impossibility and as yet there is no
authoritative statement of what the law of consideration is. Nothing
could be gained by a statement of it with all its imperfections on its
head and any consistent analytical statement would require the undoing
of much that the judges have done quietly beneath the surface for
making promises more widely enforceable. Given an attractive
philosophical theory of enforcement of promises, our courts in a new
period of growth will begin to shape the law thereby and judicial
empiricism and legal reason will bring about a workable system along
new lines. The possibilities involved may be measured if we compare
our old law of torts with its hard and fast series of nominate wrongs,
its distinctions growing out of procedural requirements of trespass
and trespass on the case and its crude idea of liability, flowing
solely from causation, with the law of torts at the end of the
nineteenth century after it had been molded by the theory of liability
as a corollary of fault. Even if we must discard the conception that
tort liability may flow only from fault, the generalization did a
service of the first magnitude not only to legal theory but to the
actual administration of justice. No less service will be rendered by
the twentieth-century philosophical theory, whatever it is, which puts
the jural postulate of civilized society in our day and place with
respect to good faith, and its corollary as to promises, in acceptable
form, and furnishes jurist and judge and lawmaker with a logical
critique, a workable measure of decision and an ideal of what the law
seeks to do, whereby to carry forward the process of enlarging the
domain of legally enforceable promises and th