Using an interdisciplinary approach involving economics, sociology, and law, Regulating Contracts explores fundamental questions about contracts and legal regulation. What kind of social relation do contracts create, or, more precisely, how do contracts cover social interaction? How are contractual relations or more generally markets constructed? Does the law play a significant role in contractual practices, and in particular what do lawyers, courts, and legal sanctions contribute to the contractual social order? For what distributive purposes does the law attempt regulation?

The controversial conclusions of this study suggest that the law plays an insignificant role in the construction of markets, and that law and lawyers could provide better assistance by using indeterminate regulation that permits the recontextualization of legal reasoning. Legal regulation of contracts concerned with redistributive tasks, such as redress of unfairness, countering unjust power relations, and access to justice, is evaluated both with respect to the objectives of regulation and the search for the most efficient and efficacious form of regulation.