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Indiana University Studies 
legal consequences. The law then begins to exert some con- 
trol. It does not “command” people to perform their con- 
tract promises any more than it commands them to make 
them. Yet it has evolved a scheme for making a promisor, 
or promisors, perform their promises. In the first place, it 
recognizes that the promisee, or promisees, have a legal right 
to the performance of the promises, and that the promisor, 
or promisors, are under a correlative legal obligation to per- 
form the promises. Why? Because the promise in the form 
of a contract is one of such importance that its non-perform- 
ance would be likely to have bad social consequences. It 
would tend to destroy the general security which is necessary 
for a stable and permanent social order, if people could not 
depend and rely upon promises of this sort. In other words, 
there is a social interest in general security involved in a 
contract which the law believes should be protected. In the 
second place, if the promisor, or promisors, do not discharge 
their legal obligations, but break their promises, the law offers 
the facilities of the courts and legal procedure to the man 
or men wronged. Sometimes the courts will decree what is 
called specific performance, but since it is now too late for 
performance at the time promised this is really specific repa- 
ration; ordinarily the courts give a judgment for damages as 
a substitute for what the promisee, or promisees, would have 
got had the promisor, or promisors, carried out their promises, 
and render certain assistance to help in the collection of the 
damages. These are the characteristics of the law so far as 
concerns contracts. 
What we have just found to be true in the case of contracts 
is true of all the other branches of the law. If we should 
go thru all the other branches of substantive law — torts, 
crimes, property, agency, domestic relations, equity, sales, pub- 
lic callings, trusts, wills, constitutional law, negotiable instru- 
ments, corporations, insurance, mortgages, quasi-contracts, 
partnerships, suretyship, bankruptcy, conflict of laws, admin- 
istrative law, etc. — we would find a scheme for controlling 
the conduct of people, where the law recognizes some social 
interest, by the recognition in one person of a right or some 
other capacity of influencing the conduct of another person 
(who thereby is under a corresponding legal duty), and by 
making the machinery of the law available for the use of the 
