My commentary relates some of the ideas presented in the symposium to two themes that I think are significant for the groundwork of contract today: The growing modularity of contracts and the waning of consent as the normative basis of legal enforcement. In conjunction with these two themes, I touch on the interplay of standardization and customization; the dialectic of rules and standards; the collapse of the distinction between the contract and the product it relates to; the problem of shoring up (or replacing?) the liberal notion of freedom of the will; and the allied issue of the political status of the regime of private ordering.

Henry E. Smith introduced the important topic of legal modularity, although my focus on it is different from his. Modularity refers to the practice of building a whole by fastening together preexisting objects, analogous to construction with building blocks. Modularity became important to physical architecture in the first part of the twentieth century and to the virtual architecture of computer science in the later twentieth century. Now modularity has become important for law.