Law Commons^™

Mitigating The Legal Challenges Associated With Blockchain Smart Contracts: The Potential Of Hybrid On-Chain/Off-Chain Contracts, Niloufer Selvadurai

Washington and Lee Law Review

Tantamount with the increasing application of blockchain technologies around the world, the use of blockchain-based smart contracts has rapidly risen. In a “smart contract,” computer protocols automatically facilitate, verify, and enforce arrangements made between parties on a blockchain. Such smart contracts offer a variety of commercial benefits, notably immutability and increased efficiency facilitated by removing the need for a trusted intermediary. However, as discussed in recent legal scholarship, it is difficult for smart contracts to uphold certain fundamental principles of contract law. Translating concepts of individual intention and responsibility into the decentralized space of blockchain is problematic. Aggregating such individual …

Pelaksanaan Perjanjian Akibat Terjadinya Wanprestasi Karena Pandemi Covid-19: Studi Perbandingan Di Indonesia Dan Malaysia, Nadya Aurelia Salsabila

Lex Patrimonium

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on various aspects of people’s lives, one of which is the existence of contracts whose implementation has been disrupted because there are some of parties who cannot fulfill their achievements or contractual obligations by postulating the Covid-19 pandemic as a category of force majeure. This research discusses the implementation of contracts due to defaults due to the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia and Malaysia. The method used is normative juridical by examining laws and regulations and court decisions in the two countries which are the focus of comparison in this research. The conclusion …

Pengakhiran Kontrak Sebelum Terjadi Wanprestasi Oleh Pihak Yang Mengantisipasi Kegagalan Pelaksanaan Kewajiban, M. Hillman Mehaga S

"Dharmasisya” Jurnal Program Magister Hukum FHUI

Termination of an agreement/contract in a situation where a party has known that he/she/it will not be able to perform its obligation(s) based on the agreement/contract to avoid the occurrence of the larger losses if the agreement/contract is still ongoing. Under Indonesian civil law, a defaulting party or a party who has anticipated that he/she/it will fail to meet obligation(s) does not have the right to file a claim to terminate an agreement/contract. This means that, this party can only be passive until the default actually happens and wait until the non-defaulting party to file the claim with the claim …

Two Visions Of Contract, Hanoch Dagan

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Justice in Transactions: A Theory of Contract Law. by Peter Benson.

Cisg Article 79: Exemption Of Performance, And Adaptation Of Contract Through Interpretation Of Reasonableness－Full Of Sound And Fury, But Signifying Something, Yasutoshi Ishida

Pace International Law Review

Article 79 of the CISG provides that “[a] party is not liable for a failure to perform any of his obligations” if the party has encountered a certain impediment defined therein. It was once depicted as “the Convention’s least successful part of the half-century of work.” It has been thirty years since the CISG took effect. However, the interpretation of Article 79 is as old and unsuccessful as ever. For one thing, it has long been interpreted against our intuition, not to exempt a party from specific performance claims. For another, the controversy has long continued unsettled over whether a …

From Promise To Form: How Contracting Online Changes Consumers, David A. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

I hypothesize that different experiences with online contracting have led some consumers to see contracts—both online and offline—in distinctive ways. Experimenting on a large, nationally representative sample, this paper provides evidence of age-based and experience-based differences in views of consumer contract formation and breach. I show that younger subjects who have entered into more online contracts are likelier than older ones to think that contracts can be formed online, that digital contracts are legitimate while oral contracts are not, and that contract law is unforgiving of breach.

I argue that such individual differences in views of contract formation and enforceability …

The Convention On Contracts For The International Sale Of Goods And The General Conditions For The Sale Of Goods, H. Lalla Shishkevish

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The Common Sense Of Contract Formation, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, David A. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

What parties know and think they know about contract law affects their obligations under the law and their intuitive obligations toward one another. Drawing on a series of new experimental questionnaire studies, this Article makes two contributions.First, it lays out what information and beliefs ordinary individuals have about how to form contracts with one another. We find that the colloquial understanding of contract law is almost entirely focused on formalization rather than actual assent, though the modern doctrine of contract formation takes the opposite stance. The second Part of the Article tries to get at whether this misunderstanding matters. Is …

Quantum Meruit For The Subcontractor: Has Restitution Jumped Off Dawson's Dock?, Doug Rendleman

Doug Rendleman

No abstract provided.

A Complete View Of The Cathedral: Claims Of Tortious Interference And The Specific Performance Remedy In Mergers And Acquisitions Litigation, Luke Nikas, Paul B. Maslo

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

A bank promises to lend several billion dollars to fund a buyer’s purchase of a target company. The buyer enters into a merger agreement with the target. Thereafter, the economy plummets, and the bank decides that breaching its contract with the buyer will cost less than performing. The buyer seeks specific performance. The target also sues the bank, alleging tortious interference with the merger agreement. Billions of dollars are on the line. This is the reality lived by many investment banks that committed to fund leveraged buyouts during the recent economic downturn. Most of these matters were resolved in private …

Quantum Meruit For The Subcontractor: Has Restitution Jumped Off Dawson's Dock?, Doug Rendleman

Doug Rendleman

No abstract provided.

Managing Moral Risk: The Case Of Contract, Aditi Bagchi

All Faculty Scholarship

The concept of moral luck describes how the moral character of our actions seems to depend on factors outside our control. Implications of moral luck have been extensively explored in criminal law and tort law, but there is no literature on moral luck in contract law. I show that contract is an especially illuminating domain for the study of moral luck because it highlights that moral luck is not just a dark cloud over morality and the law to bemoan or ignore. We anticipate moral luck, i.e., we manage our moral risk, when we take into account the possibility that …

A Comparative Fault Defense In Contract Law, Ariel Porat

Michigan Law Review

This Article calls for the recognition of a comparative fault defense in contract law. Part I sets the framework for this defense and suggests the situations in which it should apply. These situations are sorted under two headings: cases of noncooperation and cases of overreliance. Part II unfolds the main argument for recognizing the defense and recommends applying the defense only in cases where cooperation or avoidance of overreliance is low cost.

Could Breach Of Contract Be Immoral?, Seana Shiffrin

Michigan Law Review

Some scholars defend the contract law's ban on punitive damage awards on the grounds that breach of contract, in itself, is not morally wrong. In this Article, I offer two responses. First, I refute one prevalent argument of Steven Shavell's in support of this view. Shavell argues that contractual breach is not immoral in those cases in which the legal regime would offer expectation damages because the contracting parties would not have agreed to require performance had they explicitly deliberated about the circumstances occasioning the breach. I criticize his argument for failing to justify this hypothetical-contract approach and, in any …

Why Breach Of Contract May Not Be Immoral Given The Incompleteness Of Contracts, Steven Shavell

Michigan Law Review

There is a widely held view that breach of contract is immoral. I suggest here that breach may often be seen as moral, once one appreciates that contracts are incompletely detailed agreements and that breach may be committed in problematic contingencies that were not explicitly addressed by the governing contracts. In other words, it is a mistake generally to treat a breach as a violation of a promise that was intended to cover the particular contingency that eventuated.

Is U.S. Ceo Compensation Inefficient Pay Without Performance?, John E. Core, Wayne R. Guay, Randall S. Thompson

Michigan Law Review

In Pay Without Performance, Professors Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried develop and summarize the leading critiques of current executive compensation practices in the United States. This book, and their highly influential earlier article, Managerial Power and Rent Extraction in the Design of Executive Compensation, with David Walker offer a negative, if mainstream, assessment of the state of U.S. executive compensation: U.S. executive compensation practices are failing in a widespread manner, and much systemic reform is needed. The purpose of our Review is to summarize the book and to offer some counterarguments to try to balance what is becoming …

Fire, Metaphor, And Constitutional Myth-Making, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

From the standpoint of traditional legal thought, metaphor is at best a dash of poetry adorning lawyerly analysis, and at worst an unjustifiable distraction from what is actually at stake in a legal contest. By contrast, in the eyes of those who view law as a close relative of ordinary language, metaphor is a basic building block of human understanding. This article accepts that metaphor helps us to comprehend a court's decision. At the same time, it argues that metaphor plays a special role in the realm of constitutional discourse. Metaphor in constitutional law not only reinforces doctrinal categories, but …

Threatening An Irrational Breach Of Contract, Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

When circumstances surrounding the contract change, a party might consider breach a more attractive option than performance. Threatening breach, this party may induce the other party to modify the original agreement. The contract law doctrine of modification determines whether and when these modifications are enforceable. To promote social welfare as well as the interests of the threatened party, the law should enforce modifications if and only if the modification demand is backed by a credible threat to breach. This paper argues that credibility is not a function of pecuniary interests alone. A decision to breach can be motivated also by …

The Law Of Duress And The Economics Of Credible Threats, Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

This paper argues that enforcement of an agreement, reached under a threat to refrain from dealing, should be conditioned solely on the threat's credibility. When a credible threat exists, enforcement promotes social welfare and the threatened party's interests. If agreements backed by credible threats were not enforceable, the threatening party would not extort them and would instead refrain from deaing-to the threatened party's detriment. The doctrine of duress, which invalidates such agreements, hurts the coerced party. By denying enforcement when a credible threat exists, the duress doctrine precludes the threatened party from making the commitment necessary to reach agreement. Paradoxically, …

Performance Risk, Form Contracts And Ucita, Leo L. Clarke

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

No scholarly commentator has suggested that the form contract rules provide a satisfactory answer to the commercial problem of performance risk. So, one might think that the dawn of the "information economy" would be a propitious time to implement a new doctrinal approach. Apparently not: the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (the "Conference") has promulgated a comprehensive commercial statute that fails to remedy or even modify the law of form contracts in purely commercial transactions. The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act ("UCITA")--drafted to provide the background law for many of the most significant transactions in the information …

Quantum Meruit For The Subcontractor: Has Restitution Jumped Off Dawson's Dock?, Doug Rendleman

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Good Faith And The Cooperative Antagonist (Symposium On Revised Article 1 And Proposed Revised Article 2 Of The Uniform Commercial Code), James J. White

Articles

One of Karl Llewellyn's most noted achievements in the Uniform Commercial Code was to impose the duty of good faith on every obligation under the Uniform Commercial Code.1 Some (I am one) have privately thought that imposition of this unmeasurable, undefinable duty was Llewellyn's cruelest trick, but no court, nor any academic writer, has ever been so bold or so gauche as to suggest that good faith should not attend the obligations of parties under the UCC. Notwithstanding this silent indorsement of the duty of good faith, the courts2 and commentators3 have had difficulty in determining what is and what …

Autistic Contracts (Symposium), James J. White

Articles

In this paper I address the question whether the law should affirm the offeror's inference and should bind the offeree to the terms proposed by the offeror even in circumstances where the offeree may not intend to accept those terms and where an objective observer might not draw the inference of agreement from the offeree's act. Modem practice and current proposals concerning contract formation in Revised Article 2 and in the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (nee Article 2B) press these issues on us more forcefully than old practices and different law did. 1 But contractual autism is not new; …

The Secrecy Interest In Contract Law, Omri Ben-Shahar, Lisa Bernstein

Articles

A long and distinguished line of law-and-economics articles has established that in many circumstances fully compensatory expectation damages are a desirable remedy for breach of contract because they induce both efficient performance and efficient breach. The expectation measure, which seeks to put the breached-against party in the position she would have been in had the contract been performed, has, therefore, rightly been chosen as the dominant contract default rule. It does a far better job of regulating breach-or-perform incentives than its leading competitors-the restitution measure, the reliance measure, and specific performance. This Essay does not directly take issue with the …

Of Textualism, Party Autonomy, And Good Faith, Michael P. Van Alstine

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Tentative Case Against Flexibility In Commercial Law, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

Well-rooted in modern commercial law is the idea that the law and the obligations that it enforces should reflect the empirical reality of the relationship between the contracting parties. The Uniform Commercial Code ("Code") champions this tradition by viewing the performance practices formed among the parties throughout their interaction as a primary source for interpreting and supplementing their explicit contracts. The generous recognition of waiver and modifications, as well as the binding force the Code accords to course of performance, course of dealings, and customary trade usages, effectively permits unwritten commercial practices to vary and to erode explicit contractual provisions.

Agenda: Western Water: Expanding Uses/Finite Supplies, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

Western Water: Expanding Uses/Finite Supplies (Summer Conference, June 2-4)

Conference organizers and/or faculty included University of Colorado School of Law professors James N. Corbridge, Jr., Lawrence J. MacDonnell and David H. Getches.

This conference featured luncheon talks by Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm and Undersecretary of the Department of the Interior Ann McLaughlin. The conference attracted 115 registrants from 19 states plus the District of Columbia.

The Efficiency Of Specific Performance: Toward A Unified Theory Of Contract Remedies, Thomas S. Ulen

Michigan Law Review

The purpose of this essay is to begin the development of an integrated theory of contract remedies by delineating the circumstances under which courts should simply enforce a stipulated remedy clause or grant relief to the innocent party in the form of damages or specific performance. The conclusion, in brief, is that in the absence of stipulated remedies in the contract that survive scrutiny on the usual formation defenses, specific performance is more likely than any form of money damages to achieve efficiency in the exchange and breach of reciprocal promises. If specific performance is the routine remedy for breach, …

Contract Law In Modern Commercial Transactions, An Artifact Of Twentieth Century Business Life?, James J. White

Articles

Diligent first year law students study contract law with a passion previously reserved for romantic objects and religious idols. Their professors lead them in extensive and difficult intellectual explorations of the wilds of contract law. There are careful analyses of why damage recovery X will stimulate performance Y, why recovery A is appropriate to encourage the aggrieved party to return to the market, and so on and so forth. Lurking behind this year long analysis are several inarticulate hypotheses: that they make rational evaluations of the threat of legal sanctions; that they respond in other varied and subtle ways to …

Eight Cases And Section 251, James J. White

Articles

[A] continuing sense of reliance and security that the promised performance will be forthcoming. . . is an important feature of the bargain-so states Comment 1 to section 2-609 of the Uniform Commercial Code. At common law, one party to a contract might suffer considerable and justifiable anxiety about the other party's willingness or ability to perform and yet have no legal basis for cancelling the contract or for procuring additional assurances from the other party. Section 251 of the Restatement (Second) of Contracts is designed to provide a remedy for one party's reasonable fears that the other party to …