(p. 280). It is an intriguing view, especially if one adds (consistently with the views of many commentators) that currently courts are reading the obligation of good faith (in US law) far more narrowly than they did 20 or 30 years earlier. Does a changing understanding of good faith thus indicate a changing view about “recognition and respect”, or at least a different moral or policy-based balancing of “how contracting parties must balance self- and other-regard” (p. 280)? Or does it merely indicate a widely shared error either in the earlier broader understanding of good faith or in the current narrower understanding? Also (this returns to the question of theoretical scope), while good faith in US contract law applies only to performance, other legal systems understand the obligation of good faith as extending to negotiations. It would seem, under Markovits’s analysis, that the essence of contract law, or at least the essence of contractual relations, in those (non-US) legal systems must be seen as different from their US counterparts. Should we also conclude that those legal systems have a different understanding of what it means to “recogni[se] and respect” those with whom we contract? Mindy Chen-Wishart, developing ideas from H.L.A. Hart’s early work, provides a two-step defeasibility approach to understanding contractual defences like mis- representation, mistake, duress, and undue influence; this defeasibility analysis improves upon the more conventional one-step analysis grounded on party consent and voluntariness. George Letsas and Prince Saprai offer a fairness-based analysis of mitigation, which they reason is superior to an earlier analysis by Charles Fried based on altruism. Stephen Smith argues (contrary to the views of John Gardner, Joseph Raz, Ernest Weinrib, and others) that many forms of contract law damages are best understood as the redress of a wrong (of breach of contract), rather than as simply enforcing (giving effect to) the original contractual right. As part of the same analysis, Smith claims that damage orders should be seen as creating new duties, not simply reporting existing duties (or inchoate duties). And Gregory Klass explains the idea of “efficient breach” in a way far more sophisticated than the conventional (non-economist) understanding – an explanation that displays clearly certain import- ant connections between remedies, price, and efficiency, and between efficiency, non-efficiency objectives, and contract design. The book contains occasional misstatements (e.g. when Liam Murphy states that “reliance damages ... is nowhere awarded for breach of contract” (p. 162) – but see, for example, Restatement (Second) of Contract Law §349 (“As an alternative to the measure of damages stated in §347 [expectation damages], the injured party has a right to damages based on his reliance interest”) and G.H. Treitel, An Outline of The Law of Contract (6th ed., Oxford, 2004, p. 377 (reliance damages)), but these are rare. The primary impression the collection leaves is quite different: Philosophical Foundations of Contract Law is exemplary in the consistently high quality of the pieces, from first to last. BRIAN H. BIX UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA Comparative Matters: The Renaissance of Comparative Constitutional Law. By RAN HIRSCHL [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 304 pp. Hardback £29.99. ISBN 9780198714514.] In Comparative Matters: The Renaissance of Comparative Constitutional Law, Ran Hirschl considers the contemporary state of comparative constitutional law and C.L.J. 621 Book Reviews