Foundational Principles of Contract Law

Foundational Principles of Contract Law not only sets out the principles and rules of contract law, it places more emphasis on what the principles and rules of contract law should be, based on policy, morality, and experience. A major premise of the book is that the best way to grasp contract law is to understand it from a critical perspective as an organic, dynamic subject. When contract law is approached in this way it is much easier to grasp and learn than when it is presented simply as a static collection of principles and rules.

Professor Eisenberg covers almost all areas of contract law, including the enforceability of promises, remedies for breach of contract, problems of assent, form contracts, the effect of mistake and changed circumstances, interpretation, and problems of performance. Although the emphasis of the book is on the principles and rules of contract law, it also covers important theories in contract law, such as the theory of efficient breach, the theory of overreliance, the normative theory of contracts, formalism, and theories of contract interpretation.

Melvin A. Eisenberg is the Jesse H. Choper Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.

After graduating from Harvard Law School summa cum laude, Eisenberg was with the New York firm of Kaye Scholer Fierman Hays & Handler. He also served as assistant counsel to the President's commission on the assassination of President Kennedy (Warren Commission) and as assistant corporations counsel of New York City. He joined the Boalt faculty in 1966.

Eisenberg is the author of The Nature of the Common Law (1991) and The Structure of the Corporation (1997) and has published casebooks on contracts and corporations. He was Chief Reporter of the American Law Institute's Principles of Corporate Governance, an Adviser to the Institute's Restatement Third of Agency, Restatement of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment, and a member of the American Bar Association's Corporate Law Committee. He is presently an Adviser to the Institute's Restatement of Consumer Contracts. From 1991 to 1993 he held the American Law Institute's Justice R. Ami Cutter Chair. He was a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 1969, at the University of Tokyo in 1992, and at Columbia Law School from 1998 to 2009. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Senior Scholar. He holds honorary Doctor of Law degrees from Cologne University and the University of Milan

In 1984 Eisenberg delivered the Cooley Lectures at the University of Michigan. He has also given lectures at a number of universities in the United States, Germany, Italy, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. In 1990 he was awarded the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award.