Readings in Contract Law: Consideration

• Consideration in Contracts - 601 A.D. to 1520 A.D., Robert L. Henry, 26 Yale Law Journal 664 (xxxx)

  Explores the origin of the doctrine of consideration in contract law. The jurisdiction of the chancellor (in equity) over parol contracts before assumpsit, and the enforcement of parol contracts in the local courts are treated only incidentally. Contract jurisdiction within the king's law courts, and in the Anglo-Saxon law prior to the undertaking of contract jurisdiction by the king's courts, are treated more extensively. Article also argues that consideration did not have its origin in the detriment suffered in deceit, a hypothesis set forth by Professor James Barr Ames of Harvard University.

  Minn. - Rye v. Phillips, 203 Minn. 567, 282 N.W. 459, 119 A.L.R. 1120 (1938) ("The doctrine thus invoked [lack of consideration] is one of the relics of antique law which should have been discarded long ago. It is evidence of the former capacity of lawyers and judges to make the requirement of consideration an overworked shibboleth rather than a logical and just standard of actionability.").

• Reinterpretations of 18th-Century English Contract Theory: The View from Lord Mansfield's Trial Notes, James Oldham, 76 Georgetown Law Journal 1949 (xxxx)

  The modern law of contracts grew out of the common law writ system. The early writs that governed interpersonal consensual obligations, covenant and debt bore procedural and evidentiary constraints which corresponded to the limited jurisdiction of the royal courts. These constraints left the two writs (covenant and debt) largely frozen in medieval law and invited the emergence of assumpsit, a more flexible form of action derived from the expanding scope of the action known as "trespass on the case." Uncertainity about the scope of this new action led to theories that contractual liability could be implied from the conferral of what amounted to consideration. These theoretical underpinnings were not fully articulated until after Lord Mansfield's term as Chief Justice.

  Pa. - Frieds v. Fisher, 328 Pa. 497, 196 A. 39, 115 A.L.R. 147 (1938) ("The necessity of consideration to support a contract, though originally imported into the law merely as a technical requirement for the action of assumpsit, and subject of late to statutory inroads made upon it, still remains firmly entrenched as one of the fundamental principles of the common law.").