Contracts, Doctrinal Issues In

Within Western legal traditions, jurists consider contract law a part of “private law” in the sense that, like property law and tort (or “delict”), contract law is thought to deal with fundamentally private transactions. It is, of course, acknowledged that the state may enter into legally binding contracts. Nevertheless, such transactions are generally governed by the same rules that govern ordinary contracts; the state is treated as a private individual when it enters a contract. This is true even in legal systems, such as that of France, that have traditionally enforced such contracts in separate courts and on the basis (in theory anyway) of a separate body of law.