Contract: Will or Volition? Deconstructing Classical Notions and Reengineering contract Theory.

Almayahi, Haider Salah; Al-Saadi, Jalil Hassan; Issa, Lubna Abdul-Hussein

doi:10.37651/aujlps.2025.160224.1517

	Contract: Will or Volition? Deconstructing Classical Notions and Reengineering contract Theory.
Journal of Anbar University for Law and Political Sciences
Article 50, Volume 15, Issue: 2 part 2, December 2025, Pages 1301-1310 PDF (875.21 K)
Document Type: Review Paper
DOI: 10.37651/aujlps.2025.160224.1517
Authors
Haider Salah Almayahi^* ¹; Jalil Hassan Al-Saadi²; Lubna Abdul-Hussein Issa²
¹جامعة القادسية كلية القانون
²College of Law, University of Baghdad
Abstract
The debate over the difference between will and volition is not merely a linguistic issue; it is a profound philosophical and legal problem related to the nature of human action and its extension over time. In traditional philosophy, will is considered an expression of a conscious and specific decision made by a person at a specific moment, while volition is understood as a dynamic and continuous process in the individual's interaction with reality, making it more consistent with legal phenomena characterized by flexibility and change. When analyzing a contract from the perspective of will, we find that traditional legal jurisprudence is based on the assumption that contracting is a decisive moment in which the parties' wills are "frozen" at a specific point, such that contractual obligations become fixed according to the texts agreed upon at that moment. This view is based on the principle of "freedom of contract," which holds that a contract can only be modified by a new agreement between the parties, making the obligation appear as if it were an unalterable past.
Keywords
Contract; rigid will; dynamic will; engineering contract theory

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