Foreword: Is Reliance Still Dead?

In 1996, I published an article entitled The Death of Reliance; based on a talk I gave at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools on recent trends in legal scholarship. In it I claimed there then existed a "new consensus" that a "reliance theory" did not explain the doctrine of promissory estoppel.What exactly a ''reliance theory" is has never been made clear by those who seemed to advocate it-apart from their insistence that, just as tort law rectified the harm caused by physical misconduct, the purpose of contract law was to rectify detrimental reliance caused by verbal misconduct.