Fifty Years After The Death of Contract: The Schrödinger’s Dead-Alive Contract’s Paradox

This paper revisits Grant Gilmore’s The Death of Contract five decades after publication. Rather than resolving the tensions he exposed, it embraces the suspension in which Gilmore left Contract Law, a juridical Schrödinger's box where doctrinal coherence and disintegration coexist. By resisting closure, this approach invites readers to engage with Gilmore's paradoxes as if they remain ever-present. The contradictions within the Restatement (Second) of Contracts were never resolved, and the proliferation of sub-disciplines meant to coexist with the general contract theory has only obscured the deeper reality: that Private Law is a terrain of irreconcilable tensions. If Contract Law retains any centrality, it is precisely because it exposes—rather than reconciles—these structural contradictions, serving as the fault line along which the illusions of coherence in Private Law untangle.