An ontology of economic events might be like McCarthy's economic ontology, and ISO 15944-4. http://www.google.com/search?q=McCarthy+REA
http://www.tieke.fi/sc32wg1/wg1n236.zip
or my own simpler
http://ledgerism.net/UEEN05.htm

The reason I mention this is within my theory that transactions happen between the principle parties. You're working in a sort of "bank domain" in which the goal is different, that is, to maintain a ledger of the transactions of others.

Within my theory of things, people transfer ownership or control of things all the time. often they are legal contracts with reciprocity and often they are not. They might be pure gifts, or within longterm relations like marriage, for example.

Anyway--not to diss these lawyers' work or the work of maintaining other peoples' balances at banks--- the fact is that the real economy is comprised of actors transferring things to each other, sometimes in sets of 2 or more, and these are in native syntax and semantics they understand. Sometimes there isnt even an agreement and insanely, they transfer things. But retrospectively there is always an objective/empirical date, time, resource, and party IDs.

Upon that rock we can build something lasting,

Todd

Burke's paper wasn't about the contracts that arise between some random Alice and Bob scenario, but about mass market "terms and conditions" contracts that are behind most products. This is standard retail - every vendor has a form contract for their products.

What Burke is saying is that these contracts don't qualify under the regime of contract law. It took me most of the weekend to get through the paper, so I won't say read it ;-) but it is certainly well worth reading.