The restricted role of promise in the modern law

In Part 1 of this book, a study was made of the nature of promise and of the uses to which it has historically been put by Western moral and legal systems. It was explained how promise originally had a central normative role in the law, deriving partly from a stress upon the virtuous practice of keeping promises inherited from Greek thought, partly from promissory form and language inherited from Roman law, and partly from later canonical (and biblical) stress upon the duty of faithfulness to one’s word. This latter canonical stress upon promise keeping was extended from the realm of the simple promise to that of contract law. Embodied in the maxim pacta sunt servanda, it resulted in generalised contractual enforcement rather than the particular enforcement of the old Roman numerus clausus of contracts. Promissory ideas thus breathed new life into contract, allowing it to replace the promise as the paradigm voluntary obligational undertaking. Promissory language was largely relegated to the role of explaining the nature of contract as an exchange of promises, though the bare or simple promise remained as an exceptionally recognised undertaking in most systems, and in one system (Scotland) as a discrete, generally enforceable undertaking (subject to requirements of proof and subsequently form).