Revived philosophical jurisprudence has its first and perhaps its greatest opportunity in the Anglo-American law of contracts. The constantly increasing list of theoretical anomalies shows that analysis and restatement can avail us no longer. Indeed the lucid statement of Williston but emphasizes the inadequacy of analysis even when eked out by choice from among competing views and analytical restatements of judicial dogma in the light of results. Projects for "restatement of the law" are in the air. But a restatement of what has never been stated is an impossibility and as yet there is no authoritative statement of what the law of consideration is. Nothing could be gained by a statement of it with all its imperfections on its head and any consistent analytical statement would require the undoing of much that the judges have done quietly beneath the surface for making promises more widely enforceable. Given an attractive philosophical theory of enforcement of promises, our courts in a new period of growth will begin to shape the law thereby and judicial empiricism and legal reason will bring about a workable system along new lines. The possibilities involved may be measured if we compare our old law of torts with its hard and fast series of nominate wrongs, its distinctions growing out of procedural requirements of trespass and trespass on the case and its crude idea of liability, flowing solely from causation, with the law of torts at the end of the nineteenth century after it had been molded by the theory of liability as a corollary of fault. Even if we must discard the conception that tort liability may flow only from fault, the generalization did a service of the first magnitude not only to legal theory but to the actual administration of justice. No less service will be rendered by the twentieth-century philosophical theory, whatever it is, which puts the jural postulate of civilized society in our day and place with respect to good faith, and its corollary as to promises, in acceptable form, and furnishes jurist and judge and lawmaker with a logical critique, a workable measure of decision and an ideal of what the law seeks to do, whereby to carry forward the process of enlarging the domain of legally enforceable promises and thus enlarging on this side the domain of legal satisfaction of human claims. Bibliography LECTURE I Plato (B. C. 427-347), Republic. ----, Laws. Translations in Jowett's Plato. The translation of the Republic is published separately. Pseudo-Plato, Minos. Now generally considered not to be a genuine work of Plato's and variously dated from as early as c. 337 B. C. to as late as c. 250 B. C. There is a convenient translation in Bohn's Libraries. Aristotle (B. C. 384-322), Nicomachean Ethics. Convenient translation by Browne in Bohn's Libraries. ----, Politics. Translation by Jowett should be used.