KREITNER_LEAD_WDF (DO NOT DELETE) 6/20/2012 2:19 PM On the New Pluralism in Contract Theory Roy Kreitner* INTRODUCTION Pluralism is on the agenda of contract theory. Maybe pluralism is a budding movement, the next big thing; maybe it is just a rehashing of pragmatic muddling through that either shuns or doesn’t deserve the name “theory.” But whatever our predilections or eventual evaluations, it is worth noting that pluralism has become a question for theorists interested in contracts. Some of the scholars articulating what I will call pluralism have adopted this moniker themselves; others have developed pluralist insights without calling on the label. This paper has two goals. The first is to draw together a number of works that develop a pluralistic view in contract theory and to map out some of the different approaches they offer. The second goal is to take some combination of those pluralistic insights further (some will say, aside) in developing a relatively encompassing (though woefully preliminary) pluralistic conceptualization of contract. Let me admit at the outset that the label pluralism is hardly well-defined, and that the contestation over its meaning threatens to make any account of pluralist theories of contract somewhat slippery. But what I have in mind when using the term pluralism is a fairly basic intuition, captured by the idea that there is a multiplicity of justificatory principles applicable to a particular set of institutions or problems. Michael Walzer’s classic defense of pluralism in the context of thinking about distributive justice is a good place to start: There is . . . no single point of access to [the] world of distributive arrangements and ideologies. . . . Similarly, there has never been either a single decision point from which all distributions are controlled or a single set of agents making all decisions. . . . And finally, there has never been a single criterion, or a single set of interconnected criteria, for all distributions. . . . In the matter of distributive justice, history displays a great variety of * Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University. Thanks to Hanoch Dagan, Yishai Blank, Shai Lavi, Bob Scott, Jeff Lipshaw, Jody Kraus, Barak Medina, Eyal Zamir, Eyal Diskin, Anat Rosenberg, and participants at the conference on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contract Law at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and the symposium in honor of Contract as Promise at Suffolk University Law School.