further consequences, are attached to the act by law. The only other
disadvantages thus attached to it which I ever have been able to think
of are to be found in two somewhat insignificant legal doctrines, both
of which might be abolished without much disturbance. One is, that a
contract to do a prohibited act is unlawful, and the other, that, if one
of two or more joint wrongdoers has to pay all the damages, he cannot
recover contribution from his fellows. And that I believe is all. You
see how the vague circumference of the notion of duty shrinks and at the
same time grows more precise when we wash it with cynical acid and expel
everything except the object of our study, the operations of the law.

Nowhere is the confusion between legal and moral ideas more manifest
than in the law of contract. Among other things, here again the
so-called primary rights and duties are invested with a mystic
significance beyond what can be assigned and explained. The duty to keep
a contract at common law means a prediction that you must pay damages
if you do not keep it--and nothing else. If you commit a tort, you are
liable to pay a compensatory sum. If you commit a contract, you are
liable to pay a compensatory sum unless the promised event comes to
pass, and that is all the difference. But such a mode of looking at the
matter stinks in the nostrils of those who think it advantageous to get
as much ethics into the law as they can. It was good enough for Lord
Coke, however, and here, as in many others cases, I am content to abide
with him. In Bromage v. Genning, a prohibition was sought in the
Kings' Bench against a suit in the marches of Wales for the specific
performance of a covenant to grant a lease, and Coke said that it would
subvert the intention of the covenantor, since he intends it to be at
his election either to lose the damages or to make the lease. Sergeant
Harra for the plaintiff confessed that he moved the matter against his
conscience, and a prohibition was granted. This goes further than we