The later fortunes of assumpsit can be briefly told. It
introduced bilateral contracts, because a promise was a [288]
detriment, and therefore a sufficient consideration for another
promise. It supplanted debt, because the existence of the duty to
pay was sufficient consideration for a promise to pay, or rather
because, before a consideration was required, and as soon as
assumpsit would lie for a nonfeasance, this action was used to
avoid the defendant's wager of law. It vastly extended the number
of actionable contracts, which had formerly been confined to
debts and covenants, whereas nearly any promise could be sued in
assumpsit; and it introduced a theory which has had great
influence on modern law,--that all the liabilities of a bailee
are founded on contract. /1/ Whether the prominence which was
thus given to contract as the foundation of legal rights and
duties had anything to do with the similar prominence which it
soon acquired in political speculation, it is beyond my province
to inquire.
[289] LECTURE VIII.
CONTRACT. II. ELEMENTS.
THE general method to be pursued in the analysis of contract is
the same as that already explained with regard to possession.
Wherever the law gives special rights to one, or imposes special
burdens on another, it does so on the ground that certain special
facts are true of those individuals.
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