Teaching Gender As A Core Value In The Firstyear Contracts Class, Kerri Lynn Stone
Aug 2017
Teaching Gender As A Core Value In The Firstyear Contracts Class, Kerri Lynn Stone
Kerri Stone
No abstract provided.
Fiduciary-Isms: A Study Of Academic Influence On The Expansion Of The Law, Daniel B. Yeager
Mar 2017
Fiduciary-Isms: A Study Of Academic Influence On The Expansion Of The Law, Daniel B. Yeager
Daniel B. Yeager
Fiduciary law aspires to nullify power imbalances by obligating strong parties to give themselves over to servient parties. For example, due to profound imbalances of legal know-how, lawyers must as fiduciaries pursue their clients’ interests, not their own, lest clients get lost in the competitive shuffle. As a peculiar hybrid of status and contract relations, politics and law, compassion and capitalism, fiduciary law is very much in vogue in academic circles. As vogue as it is, there remains room for my “Fiduciary-isms...”, a meditation on the expansion of fiduciary law from its origins in the law of trusts through partnerships, …
Market Practice And The Evolution Of Foreign Sovereign Immunity, W. Mark C. Weidemaier, Mitu Gulati
Dec 2016
Market Practice And The Evolution Of Foreign Sovereign Immunity, W. Mark C. Weidemaier, Mitu Gulati
W. Mark C. Weidemaier
The twentieth century witnessed a “tectonic” shift in international law, from absolute to restrictive theories of sovereign immunity. As conventionally understood, however, this transformation represented only a change in default rule. Under absolute immunity, courts could not hear lawsuits and enforce judgments against a foreign sovereign without its consent. Under restrictive immunity, foreign sovereigns were not immune to their commercial acts, regardless of consent. Using a two-century dataset of loan contracts, we show that market practice undermines this conventional understanding. For centuries, loan contracts were structured as if the rules of sovereign immunity could not be changed by contract. In …
Understanding Insurance Policies As Noncontracts: An Alternative Approach To Drafting And Construing These Unique Financial Instruments, Christopher French
Dec 2016
Understanding Insurance Policies As Noncontracts: An Alternative Approach To Drafting And Construing These Unique Financial Instruments, Christopher French
Christopher C. French
Insurance policies commonly are understood to be a species of standardized contracts. This Article challenges that conventional wisdom and argues that insurance policies do not actually qualify as contracts under the doctrinal and theoretical bases of contract formation. It examines the process by which insurance policies are created and sold, and measures that process against the requirements for contract formation. This Article also distinguishes insurance policies from other types of standardized contracts, such as wrap agreements, which currently are the subject of much litigation and scholarly commentary. It then explores the doctrinal and theoretical bases underlying the specialized rules that …
Insurance Policies: The Grandparents Of Contractual Black Holes, Christopher French
Dec 2016
Insurance Policies: The Grandparents Of Contractual Black Holes, Christopher French
Christopher C. French
In their recent article, The Black Hole Problem in Commercial Boilerplate, Professors Stephen Choi, Mitu Gulati, and Robert Scott identify a phenomenon found in standardized contracts they describe as “contractual black holes.” The concept of black holes comes from theoretical physics. Under the original hypothesis, the gravitational pull of a black hole is so strong that once light or information is pulled past an event horizon into a black hole, it cannot escape. In recent years, the theory has been reformulated and now the hypothesis is that some information can escape, but it is so degraded that it is virtually …
