A law from 1677 still decides which promises must be in writing.

Why a 350-year-old statute is still on your desk

A client shakes hands on a deal, both sides perform for months, and then one of them walks away insisting there was never a binding contract because nothing was signed. Sometimes that argument works. The reason is a statute that predates the United States: the English Statute of Frauds, enacted in 1677. Its formal name was "An Act for Prevention of Frauds and Perjuries," and it was passed in the twenty-ninth year of Charles II, cited to this day as 29 Charles II c. 3.

The idea it introduced, that certain kinds of promise are enforceable only if there is a signed writing, is now so ordinary that most attorneys meet it as a rule with no history at all. But the history explains the rule, and it explains why the rule survives in a form the country that wrote it has mostly thrown away.

The perjury problem it was built to solve

The statute's own preamble named its target: fraudulent claims propped up "by perjury and subornation of perjury." In late-seventeenth-century England, a person could stand up in court and swear that a valuable oral bargain had been struck, and it was extraordinarily hard to rebut. The trial system of the era gave a jury thin evidentiary rules to work with. More striking to modern eyes, the parties to a lawsuit were themselves legally disqualified from testifying, on the theory that their own interest made them untrustworthy witnesses. England did not remove that disqualification until the Evidence Acts of the mid-nineteenth century.

So a defendant who had genuinely never made the promise often could not take the stand to say so. Requiring a signed writing for the transactions most worth lying about gave courts a piece of reliable evidence that a bare oath could not manufacture. The statute did not ask judges to decide who was telling the truth. It simply refused to enforce certain promises unless someone had written them down and signed.

The six kinds of promise it covered

Law students still learn the original categories through the mnemonic "MY LEGS." The letters stand for the six situations the 1677 statute pulled within its writing requirement:Marriage, promises made in consideration of marriage, such as a marriage settlement; the one-Year rule, agreements that by their terms cannot be performed within a year; Land, the sale of land or any interest in it;Executor, an executor's or administrator's promise to pay an estate's debts out of personal funds; Goods, the sale of goods above a set value, which the original act fixed at ten pounds sterling; and Suretyship, a promise to answer for the debt, default, or miscarriage of another person.

What ties the six together is not their subject but their risk. Each is a setting where a false claim of an oral promise could do serious, hard-to-disprove damage. The statute asked for a signature precisely where the stakes and the temptation to lie ran highest.

How it crossed the Atlantic and stayed

The American colonies inherited the statute as part of English common law, and after independence the individual states carried it into their own codes. There is no single federal statute of frauds. Instead it lives in each state's law, and for the sale of goods it lives in the Uniform Commercial Code, which nearly every state has enacted. Under UCC section 2-201, a contract for the sale of goods for the price of 500 dollars or more is not enforceable, with limited exceptions, unless there is a signed writing.

That 500-dollar line has drawn fire for being frozen in an earlier economy, and reformers tried to move it. A set of amendments to UCC Article 2, approved by the uniform-law bodies in the early 2000s, would have raised the threshold to 5,000 dollars. No state adopted them, and in 2011 the sponsoring organizations formally withdrew the revised article. The 500-dollar figure remains the working rule in essentially every state.

The writing itself does not have to be a formal contract. It has to be signed by the party the plaintiff is trying to hold to the deal, the "party to be charged," and it has to show that a contract was made. Under the UCC the one term that must appear is quantity, and the agreement is enforceable only up to the quantity the writing states.

The gaps the courts left open

A rule that lets people escape real bargains on a technicality invites its own abuse, and courts have long built exceptions so the statute does not become a tool for the very fraud it was meant to prevent. Four of the most important: