Contract law makes trust irrelevant by neutralizing who actually trusted.

Evidence

In particular, the legal institution of the contract formed purely through the concurrence of the parties’ declared intentions entails a juridical reformulation of the principle of trust in terms of law which makes it too independent for trust to play a role either as a factual condition or as a ground for the validity of contracts. Claims are based directly on contract, and it does not matter who, if anyone, has made an investment advance in a given case. In fact, if contracts are to be trusted it is necessary that their performance be made independent of the question of who, if anyone, has in fact trusted. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 175

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how legal systems functionally substitute trust rather than incorporate it — the contract’s validity is independent of whether anyone actually trusted, which is precisely what lets faceless institutions stand in for interpersonal facework.
• XREF: Pairs with Giddens’s faceless commitments: legal contracts are the expert-system form that removes the need for personal trust, exactly the hollow institutional scaffolding Stevens leans on while never examining Darlington morally.