Scholarship
Macneil was one of the world's leading and best known scholars in the field of contract law and is particularly associated (along with Stewart Macaulay) with the invention of "Relational Contract Theory". This theory had its first outing at the Association of American Law Professors' annual conference in late 1967 and was first alluded to in print in Macneil's article "Whither Contracts?" in 1969. However, the first really substantial articles laying down the foundations of the theory appeared in 1974. "Restatement (Second) of Contracts and Presentiation" and "The Many Futures of Contracts". He developed the theory further in "Contracts: Adjustment of Long-Term Economic Relations Under Classical, Neoclassical, and Relational Contract Law", and in his famous monograph The New Social Contract. He wrote a good deal more on relational contracts after 1980, mainly concerned with explaining and defending the theory, which has been much misunderstood by academic commentators, whether critical of or in favour of relational theory, but the outlines and much of the detail of the theory were settled by 1980.
In 2000 Macneil renamed his theory "essential contract theory" in order to distinguish it from other possible versions of relational contract Further interesting explanation has been given by Macneil in "Reflections on Relational Contract Theory after a Neo-classical Seminar".
Macneil was also responsible, with Speidel and Stipanowich for a magisterial five-volume treatise on U.S. arbitration law, Federal Arbitration Law: Agreements, Awards, and Remedies under the Federal Arbitration Act(Little, Brown: Boston, 1994), which in 1995 won the American Association of Publishers' Best New Legal Book award, as well as a monograph on arbitration.
The main elements of Macneil's relational contract theory were developed in a series of publications from 1969 to 1980, some of which are outlined below. It should be noted that he has continued to this day to publish articles and participate in colloquia in this field; however, the publications discussed below represent the key, formative literature of Macneil's version of relational theory, while subsequent publications have been mainly explanatory of the work done throughout the 1970s.
Read more about this topic: Ian Roderick Macneil
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