Abstract

For millennia, the downtrodden, disengaged and desperate have been deprived of the legal right to conclude a Faustian bargain to their worldly and material benefit. This has been due to the ambiguity in the value of the consideration offered by the contracting party: namely, the human soul. The alleged ephemeral value of the soul (and indeed, post-structural speculation as to its existence) has been used to curtail the development of this potentially valuable area of contract law by rendering any Faustian bargain de facto invalid. This study submits that existing research which has supported this legal position relies on imprecise and vague metrics of value, such as MacDougall (1907) who concluded that the weight of the human soul is only 21 grams, and thus of apparent limited worth. Instead, this study is the first of its kind to establish a robust valuation metric for the soul, employing a socio-legal methodology to measure the offset in value between eternal damnation and worldly treasures. The research concludes that the value of a human soul is sufficient and proportionate consideration for a number of equivalent goods and services, including but not limited to: eternal youth, unlimited power and insurmountable piles of gold.