Some leading themes in the contract scholarship of Stephen Waddams

Among the leading themes in Stephen Waddams’s monumental contributions to the development and deeper understanding of modern contract law, this chapter focuses on two of the most fundamental that particularly preoccupied him throughout his career. The first concerns the proper significance and roles of equity and common law after their integration in 1875 in a single court. Perhaps even more important for contract law, the second has to do with the meaning and place of principles of contractual fairness in the overall doctrinal framework of contract law and, more particularly, in relation to the doctrines of contract formation and also the need for certainty and security in contractual transactions. Waddams understood both sets of issues as relating to, and, indeed, as specifying, what he later referred to as ‘the concept of contractual enforceability.’ This chapter first presents key aspects of his view as he developed them across his entire scholarly work and then briefly suggests a line of inquiry that builds on his ideas and that further elaborates the concept of enforceability as he understood it.