Law Commons^™

Taxonomy For Justifying Legal Intervention In An Imperfect World: What To Do When Parties Have Not Achieved Bargains Or Have Drafted Incomplete Contracts, Juliet P. Kostritsky

Faculty Publications

This paper addresses the fundamental methodological issue of when courts should intervene in incomplete contracts by interpreting them, filling in gaps and imposing liability on parties who have not yet reached a bargain. It addresses whether such intervention poses a threat to the parties' freedom from contract, the subject of the Wisconsin Symposium on Freedom from Contract. It uses an instrumental approach to determine the circumstances in which courts can outperform parties in improving welfare by intervention. It assesses the two dominant strands of scholarship for addressing the legal intervention question. One strand emphasizes the costs of parties achieving complete …

Symposium - Incomplete Contracts: Judicial Responses, Transactional Planning, And Litigation Strategies - Introduction, Juliet P. Kostritsky

Faculty Publications

This introduction introduces three articles in a Symposium by Richard Craswell, Avery Katz, Robert Scott and George Triantis on the topic of incomplete contracts. The Symposium appears in 56 CASE WES. L. REV. 135 (2005).

The recognition that parties will often fail to achieve completely contingent contracts that provide for an optimal outcome in any future state of the world raises the important question of what role courts could or should play in such contracts.

Scholars working in the law-and-economics tradition have suggested that courts should use a hypothetical bargain approach to incompleteness, filling in terms that are optimal (efficient) …