Mutual promises give rise to an obligation, and their breach to a right of action for damages. Time was when the obligation and the remedy were unknown unless the promise was under seal.” Benjamin Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process, at 27 (Yale Univ. Press, 1921).

At what point seals no longer “counted for a good deal” and became one of the “rubrics of a vanished era,” Judge Cardozo does not tell us; it occurred when the law became “conscious of its own absurdity.” Id. at 155.