Stewart Macaulay: Selected Works

This book represents a unique resource about Stewart Macaulay one of the common law world’s leading scholars of the law of contract and of the law in action approach to the study of law. Since 1959, he has published over 50 articles in leading journals, a number of working papers, (with colleagues at the University of Wisconsin Law School) a pathbreaking casebook for the teaching of the law of contract, and (with other colleagues) equally pathbreaking collections of materials for the teaching of the law in action or law in context approach to the study of law. In this work Macaulay has established himself as one of the postwar world’s leading scholars of the law of contract and of the sociology of law. His work is an absolute reference point in both disciplines, and it has attracted great attention elsewhere, most notably in economic sociology, where his concept of non-contractual economic relationships is regarded as an important theoretical innovation. Macaulay’s work has become an object of commentary in its own right, and the proposed book is intended to assist further such commentary by making hitherto difficult to obtain works readily accessible. Most of Macaulay’s work is now, when the leading journals are generally available in electronic form, readily accessible to students and researchers in universities. There are, however, a number of interesting and in most cases important works published  in less accessible journals or works which were not published in an electronic form, which are difficult to obtain. This book will make them readily available, and in so doing will make it possible in future for scholars to have Macaulay’s complete oeuvre readily to hand.

Although Macaulay’s work has provoked very considerable discussion, there previously have been no overall accounts of that work as opposed to critical engagements with aspects of it. In this book, two additional essays by leading commentators give accounts of Macaulay’s work andprovide an introduction to, exegesis of and general evaluation of Macaulay’s work as a whole which is not to be found in the existing literature.