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Full-Text Articles in Law
Contracts And Friendships, Ethan J. Leib
Contracts And Friendships, Ethan J. Leib
Faculty Scholarship
This Article aims to give the relational theory of contract new life, sharpening some of its claims against its competitors by refracting its theory of relational contracts through an analogy to friendship. In drawing the analogy between friendships and relational contracts and revealing their morphological similarities, this Article offers a provocative window into friendship's contractual structure--and into relational contracts' approximation of friendships. The analogy developed here is poised to replace the “relational contract as marriage” model prevalent among relationalists. This new model is more honest to relational contract theory and to marriage--and helps relational contract theory produce some new insights, …
Friendship & The Law, Ethan J. Leib
Friendship & The Law, Ethan J. Leib
Faculty Scholarship
This Article's central argument is that the law needs to do a better job of recognizing, protecting, respecting, and promoting friendships. The law gives pride of place to other statuses--family and special professional relationships are obvious ones--but the status of the friend is rarely relevant to legal decisionmaking and public policymaking in a consistent way. After defining the concept of the friend, I offer a normative argument for why the law should promote a public policy of friendship facilitation and for why the law ignores friendships only at its peril. I highlight how the law already finds friendship relevant in …
On Collaboration, Organizations, And Conciliation In The General Theory Of Contract, Ethan J. Leib
On Collaboration, Organizations, And Conciliation In The General Theory Of Contract, Ethan J. Leib
Faculty Scholarship
Daniel Markovits's Contract and Collaboration is a thought-provoking and ground-breaking inquiry into the ethics of contract. It argues that the philosophical foundation of contract may be found in what Markovits calls the collaborative view: a principle of forming respectful communities of collaboration where contractors treat each other as ends in themselves and refrain from treating each other as mere instrumentalities. Markovits acknowledges that there are three prototypical forms of contracts: (1) person-to-person; (2) person-to-organization; and (3) organization-to-organization. He is refreshingly honest in arguing that his theory of contract only addresses Type (1) contracts. I wish to argue here that this …