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• Markovits, D. (2004). "Contract and Collaboration." The Yale Law Journal 113(7): 1417.

http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=647352481&sid=1&Fmt=4&clientId=44986&RQT=309&VName=PQD
Promises lie at the center of persons' moral experience of one another, and contracts lie at the center of their legal experience of one another. Many of the most important relationships in our moral and legal culture characteristically arise in connection with promises and contracts of some form or other: Persons' families are connected to marriage promises, their work is connected to employment contracts, and even their citizenship is connected (albeit metaphorically) to the social contract. In all these cases, and in myriad others, promises and contracts establish relations among the persons who engage them. But in spite of the obviously communal character of promise and contract, the most prominent accounts of these practices remain firmly individualistic, seeking to explain the obligations they involve in terms of one or another service that these practices render to the several parties who engage them. This paper insists, however, that individualistic theories do not capture or reflect the distinctive moral center of promise and contract, which cannot be found in any properties of the parties taken severally but appears instead in the relations among persons that promises and contracts create. The paper develops the insight that promise and contract establish relations among the persons who engage them into a mature theory of promise and especially of contract.