That’s surprising to me; I expected contracts to have a sufficiently long history that there wouldn’t be any recent major innovations. In retrospect, I realize a long history alone isn’t enough to assume that: mathematics is also ancient but has seen its fair share of recent-ish innovations anyway.
From Personal To Prison Gangs is probably relevant here. As society transitions from many repeated interactions between small numbers of individuals to more one-off interactions between large numbers of individuals (ultimately enabled by communication and transportation technology), we should expect more reliance on formal rules and standards. Those formal rules and standards also need to cover more people in a wider variety of situations—they need to be more general-purpose (since people themselves are less siloed than previously).
That sort of transition seems to have been particularly prevalent around the early-to-mid twentieth century.
That’s the sort of heuristic which predicts this kind of fundamental shift in contract law (among many other things) around the time that we saw such a shift.
From Personal To Prison Gangs is probably relevant here. As society transitions from many repeated interactions between small numbers of individuals to more one-off interactions between large numbers of individuals (ultimately enabled by communication and transportation technology), we should expect more reliance on formal rules and standards. Those formal rules and standards also need to cover more people in a wider variety of situations—they need to be more general-purpose (since people themselves are less siloed than previously).
That sort of transition seems to have been particularly prevalent around the early-to-mid twentieth century.
That’s the sort of heuristic which predicts this kind of fundamental shift in contract law (among many other things) around the time that we saw such a shift.