Law Commons^™

Law And The Blockchain, Usha Rodrigues

Scholarly Works

All contracts are necessarily incomplete. The inefficiencies of bargaining over every contingency, coupled with humans’ innate bounded rationality, mean that contracts cannot anticipate and address every potential eventuality. One role of law is to fill gaps in incomplete contracts with default rules. The blockchain is a distributed ledger that allows the cryptographic recording of transactions and permits “smart” contracts that self-execute automatically if their conditions are met. Because humans code the contracts of the blockchain, gaps in these contracts will arise. Yet in the world of “smart contracting” on the blockchain, there is no place for the law to step …

Essentials Of A Publication Agreement, Stephen Wolfson, Mariann Burright

Presentations

This session will focus on authors' rights and publishing contracts. When academic publishers agree to publish academic works, they require the authors to sign agreements before doing so. In the past, these “agreements” – contracts, by another name – often have contained provisions that primarily benefit the publishers, including assigning intellectual property rights in the works to the publishers and limiting authors’ abilities to use their works after transferring their rights. Faculty authors often ask librarians for their guidance on how to read and negotiate publication agreements. As such, this session will discuss common provisions found in publishing contracts to …

What's In A Licensing Agreement?, Stephen Wolfson, Mariann Burright

Presentations

Now that you know the foundations of enforceable contracts, and want to have more familiarity with some nuts and bolts of contract language to become a better negotiator for your institutions, you will want to take this second webinar.
Participants will learn:
• What are the basic provisions or clauses of a contract?
• What do these provisions obligate my institution to do?
• What do these provisions obligate the other party to do?
• What rights does my institution have if the other party breaks its obligations?

Contract Basics For Librarians And Others In Higher Ed, Stephen Wolfson, Mariann Burright

Presentations

If you have signature or negotiation authority for your institution, and would like to get an overview of contracts to learn what your institution’s rights and obligations may be under a contract, this session is for you! Participants will learn:

• Why it is important to understand how contracts work?
• What does it mean for a contract to be enforceable in a US court?
• How is an enforceable contract formed?
• What could lead to contract breach?

Saturns For Rickshaws: Lessons For Consumer Arbitration And Access To Justice, Peter B. Rutledge

Scholarly Works

Companies are increasingly requiring consumers to agree to arbitrate disputes they may have over the products or services they purchase. Pre-dispute arbitration agreements are controversial especially for consumer disputes, where, it is feared, consumers will not represent themselves and neither will lawyers come forward because of the small stakes involved in individual claims. Dean Rutledge addresses in this chapter whether consumer arbitration processes can be designed to provide greater access to justice for consumers.

"Sticky" Arbitration Clauses? The Use Of Arbitration Clauses After Concepcion And Amex, Peter B. Rutledge, Christopher R. Drahozal

Scholarly Works

We present the results of the first empirical study of the extent to which businesses have switched to arbitration after AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion. After the Supreme Court’s decision in Concepcion, commentators predicted that every business soon would use an arbitration clause, coupled with a class arbitration waiver, in their standard form contracts to avoid the risk of class actions. We examine two samples of franchise agreements: one sample in which we track changes in arbitration clauses since 1999, and a broader sample focusing on changes since 2011, immediately before Concepcion was decided. Our central finding is consistent across …

Contract And Procedure, Peter B. Rutledge, Christopher R, Drahozal

Scholarly Works

This paper examines both the theoretical underpinnings and empirical picture of procedural contracts. Procedural contracts may be understood as contracts in which parties regulate not merely their commercial relations but also the procedures by which disputes over those relations will be resolved. Those procedural contracts regulate not simply the forum in which disputes will be resolved (arbitration vs litigation) but also the applicable procedural framework (discovery, class action waivers, remedies limitations, etc.). At a theoretical level, this paper explores both the limits on parties' ability to regulate procedure by contract (at issue in the Supreme Court's recent Rent-A-Center decision) and …

The Limits Of Procedural Private Ordering, Jaime L. Dodge

Scholarly Works

Civil procedure is traditionally conceived of as a body of publicly-set rules, with limited carve-outs – most commonly, forum selection and choice of law provisions. I argue that these terms are mere instantiations of a broader, unified phenomenon of procedural private ordering, in which civil procedure is no longer irrevocably defined by law, but instead is a mere default that can be waived or modified by contract. Parties are no longer merely selecting between publicly-created procedural regimes but customizing the rules of procedure to be applied by the court – from statutes of limitations, discovery obligations and the admissibility of …

The Entrepreneur And The Theory Of The Modern Corporation, Charles R.T. O'Kelley

Scholarly Works

The foremost description of the classic entrepreneur, immediately prior to the Great Depression and now, was presented by Frank Knight in his seminal work, RISK, UNCERTAINTY, AND PROFIT. In this Article, I will explicate Knight's theory of the entrepreneur and show how it relates to both the Berle-Means Paradigm and the nexus-of-contracts theory of the corporation. My effort here is in part intellectual history and in part the tentative beginnings of a new positive account of the corporation. In the latter regard, this Article takes only the first step in what may prove a quite exhaustive effort to re-plow the …

Pre-Contractual Obligations In France And The United States, Florence Caterini

LLM Theses and Essays

This thesis compares the pre-contractual obligations in France and the United States. The focus of this study is to analyze how both legal systems deal with these pre-contractual obligations. It focuses on the possibilities given to the parties to protect themselves during the negotiation process. In event of breach of negotiations, the law gives legal remedies to the parties. French and American laws have a different analysis of the problem but they reach similar result: liability under contract law when a contract has been formed or a tentative agreement, or under tort law when no agreement whatsoever has been reached.

Contracts And Electronic Agents, Sabrina Kis

LLM Theses and Essays

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the formation of contracts concluded by electronic agents both in the European Union and the United States. Technology is in constant evolution and the possibilities offered by electronic agents today are far from the ones that could be developed tomorrow. Thus, law faces a permanent challenge to adapt itself to these changes. This paper aims to show that the existing principles do not provide an appropriate legal frame for this new type of contract. In addition, since legislatures have attempted to regulate this new way of doing business, this thesis analyzes the …

An Analysis Of The Duty To Negotiate In Good Faith: Precontractual Liability And Preliminary Agreement, Aarti Arunachalam

LLM Theses and Essays

Good faith is one concept that defies a clear definition and courts have struggled to understand and establish its scope and ambit. This paper just seeks to analyze the scope of the duty of good faith as understood at the stage when actually no contract has been formed. Despite considerable support for the existence of a duty of good faith, courts in US have not been very receptive in recognizing the duty of good faith especially in the precontractual stage, especially when parties enter into preliminary agreement. Courts have relied on the a number of factors to determine the enforceability …

Gap-Filling And Freedom Of Contract, Shumei Lu

LLM Theses and Essays

When a client asks his lawyer what his duties are under a particular contract, normally the lawyer’s first response is “show me the contract.” Does the contract provide all the contract duties in its expressed form? Definitely not. By now everyone acknowledges that, to some extent, all contracts have some gaps. Even the most carefully drafted document rests on volumes of assumptions that cannot be explicitly expressed.1 The inevitability of gaps reflects both our “relative ignorance of fact” and “our relative indeterminacy of aim.” Generally speaking, there are three types of gaps: first, the parties to a contract have not …

International Arbitration And Procedures To Enforce Awards In The Relationship Between The United States And Germany, Michael Kronenburg

LLM Theses and Essays

Arbitration has long been regarded as a process that combines finality of decision with speed, low expense, and flexibility in solving problems. For these reasons, arbitration is often favored over litigation for dispute resolution. Particularly in international cases, a businessman may avoid litigation in a foreign country for various reasons: he may be unfamiliar with the proceedings; he may be afraid to find a “forum hostile” because of the different legal and cultural background of the judges; and he may wish to avoid the uncertainty concerning the law arising from the contract. Arbitration proceedings have been held constitutional by the …

Job Security: Protecting At-Will Employees With Good Cause Legislation, Mayumi Yokoyama

LLM Theses and Essays

Recent decades have witnessed significant developments in employment termination law in the United States. In particular, the long-standing “at-will” doctrine, under which employers can fire employees for good, bad, or no reason at all, has experienced great erosion and wide variations in law from state to state. There has been a movement of statutory and common law restrictions limiting an employer’s freedom to terminate at will, which reflects the increasing consciousness of job security by society and workers. This paper analyzes the problem of job security by tracing the origin of the at-will doctrine to 19th century principles favoring economic …

Reinsurance: Bad Faith Considerations And Insolvency Dilemma, Hui-Ju Hsieh

LLM Theses and Essays

Reinsurance is insurance that an insurance company purchases from another insurance company. The original insurance company is called the reinsured, and the insurance company that is contracted is called the reinsurer. The main purpose of reinsurance is to disperse or spread the risk of loss. The reinsurance relationship is frequently characterized as an exercise of fiduciary responsibility based upon an undertaking of utmost good faith between contracting parties. However, disputes arise; most litigation involving reinsurance has been between reinsurers and persons not party to the reinsurance agreement. This paper’s first major area of discussion is the relationship between the reinsurer …

A Slave's Marriage: Dowry Or Deposit, Alan Watson

Scholarly Works

This articles examines the concept of dowry among marriage of slaves in ancient Rome.

Binding Contracts In Georgia Local Government Law: Configurations Of Codification, R. Perry Sentell Jr.

Scholarly Works

The potential for creating uncertainty looms as a primary and ever-present problem in the codification process. A dominant concern is the fear the unintended statutory changes--or, worse still, the quandary of whether what appears to be such a change was truly intended--may result. The perplexing issues emanating from that quandary can considerably dissipate the benefits of progressive statutory codification. For purely illustrative purposes, attention might be called to the present plight of an historic precept in Georgia local government law. That precept unflinchingly condemns a local governing authority's efforts to commit its successors to a given course of governmental action. …

A New And Old Theory For Adjudicating Standardized Contracts, Eric Mills Holmes, Dagmar Thurmann

Scholarly Works

The purpose of this article is rather simple, extracting a new theory of standard form contracts from the good bits of the spectrum of "old" ideas and combining them with some fresh rethinking. For something fresh, the authors choose to examine the German law on standard form contracts. The authors have tried to remain neutral observers but in extracting the best from the spectrum of ideas one necessarily states--in this instance, one of pragmatic compromise. Thus, this article will cull and identify elements from the spectrum specifically concerning standard form contracts and compare them with the German approach. This process …

Protection Of Shipowners’ Liability Under United States Law And Marine Insurance Practice, Izak Stephanus Fourie

LLM Theses and Essays

Shipowners are exposed to a variety of risks that are, to a large extent, unique to maritime business. Because of factors like the recent increase in the size and value of ships, increase in marine traffic, enactment of legislation imposing new liabilities, and the tendency of courts to make huge awards to personal injury and death claims, shipowners are exposed to potential losses or claims worth millions of dollars in the event of disaster. These heavy risks led to the establishment of the marine insurance industry, as well as the enactment of legislation that limits shipowners’ liability. This legislation was …

The Evolution Of Law: The Roman System Of Contracts, Alan Watson

Scholarly Works

I have two aims in producing this paper. First, I wish to contribute to the general understanding of how and why law develops and explain the evolution of some very familiar legal institutions. Second, I wish to add to our knowledge of the history of Roman law, by producing a radically different view of the development of contracts, that is, I believe, both consistent with surviving textual data and plausible with regard to human behavior.