Roman law banned agents from signing for you; Islamic law allowed it
Hiring someone to sign a deal on your behalf feels utterly ordinary, yet Roman law refused to recognise it. Islamic law accepted agency, trade along the Silk Road spread the practice, and today common law and most civil law systems follow the Islamic approach rather than the Roman one.
A contract is an agreement creating legally enforceable rights and duties between two or more parties, usually a promise to hand over goods, services or money now or later. When one side breaks it, the other can ask a court for damages or for equitable remedies such as an order to perform or to unwind the deal. The whole field rests on the idea that agreements should be kept. Between states, the same kind of binding agreement is called a treaty.
Deals are as old as settled life, going back to the Neolithic shift to farming and trade. One influential development was hawala, an informal network of contractual obligations that moved value across the Arab world and the Indian subcontinent. In India it produced the hundi, a transferable paper letting whoever held it collect money from the issuer, the ancestor of modern negotiable instruments. Transferring a debt, likewise forbidden in Roman law, became common in medieval Europe largely through commerce with Muslim traders.
Since the nineteenth century the world has split into two main families. Former British colonies mostly adopted English common law, which generally insists on consideration, something of value given by each side. Civil law systems mostly require only a meeting of minds. Within that civil family, Japan, South Korea and the Republic of China followed German models, much of the Arab world followed the Napoleonic Code, and in 1926 Turkey swapped its Ottoman mix of religious and secular rules for a code modelled on Switzerland's.
Bridging those differences is a practical problem, so many contracts name the governing law and the court or forum for disputes. The UNIDROIT principles for international commercial contracts, published in 2016, go further, offering a neutral framework that drops consideration entirely on the grounds that it breeds litigation. Theorists still argue over why contracts deserve enforcement at all: some stress the economic value of reliable bargains, while Charles Fried argued that contract law simply enforces promises.
Source: Contract
