Promissory Estopple In American Contract Law

Promissory estopple is a special legal system in American contract law, which is adopted for the situation of contract without consideration or other formal requirements. Through promissory estopple, such contract has compulsory execution and the detrimental reliance can be remedied. Both civil law and common law has its own rules to protect reliance, for civil law, they are culpa in contrahendo and rechtsscheinhagtung, while for common law, promissory estopple is the major representative. As local knowledge, law reflects the history, cultural tradition and the value. Therefore researching the law in another legal system is not only about the law itself, but also about the history and culture exploration.The development of promissory estopple was always related to consideration principle, another key rule for common law contract. The origin of consideration was related to formalism of ancient contract law. Many theorists and scholars appeared in contact law history, their opinions and ideas influence the emergence and development of system. We can say the history of promissory estopple is the history of legal thoughts. With different dominant legal thoughts, there are corresponding legal systems.The first and second Restatements of Contracts completely regulate the promissory estopple. And the promissory estopple was firstly established in Restatements of Contracts (First), and the consideration principle was dominant during that time. With expansion of adoption in legal practice, the Restatements of Contracts (Second) was born. Promissory estopple was also adjusted in this restatement. However it is not enough to understand it from the words, attention should be paid in legal practice. Through the individual case and judges’ trial, many theory problems can be solved in new angle. One problem is the debate of liability basis. Reliance is the dominant idea, however through researching the legal practice, we can find it is beyond reliance, for both liability basis and compensation principle, contractual character is obvious for promissory estopple. Promise and reliance are not separated but take effects at the same time.Finally, it is important to survey a system in a comparative view. For Chinese contract law, reliance protection is culpa in contrahendo. By comparing with promissory estopple, we can find the differences and existing problems regarding to reliance protection in Chinese law. We have a long way to go in reliance protection and we can learn from promissory estopple.