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Full-Text Articles in Law
Pricing Terms In Sovereign Debt Contracts: A Greek Case Study With Implications For The European Crisis Resolution Mechanism, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner
Pricing Terms In Sovereign Debt Contracts: A Greek Case Study With Implications For The European Crisis Resolution Mechanism, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner
Faculty Scholarship
Conventional wisdom holds that boilerplate contract terms are ignored by parties, and thus are not priced into contracts. We test this view by comparing Greek sovereign bonds that have Greek choice-of-law terms and Greek sovereign bonds that have English choice-of-law terms. Because Greece can change the terms of Greek-law bonds unilaterally by changing Greek Law, and cannot change the terms of English-law bonds, Greek-law bonds should be riskier, with higher yields and lower prices. The spread between the two types of bonds should increase when the probability of Greek default increases. Recent events allow us to test this hypothesis, and …
Foreword: The Three And A Half Minute Transaction: Boilerplate And The Limits Of Contract Design, Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Foreword: The Three And A Half Minute Transaction: Boilerplate And The Limits Of Contract Design, Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
The Hofstra Law Review has organized an “Ideas” symposium around our book manuscript “The Three and a Half Minute Transaction” (see http://ssrn.com/abstract=1937900). The idea for this symposium came from a debate that occurred at a faculty workshop at the Hofstra Law School some months ago where we were presenting our book manuscript. The topics of conversation included the following: the future of the current big-law-firm model, what value lawyers add in commercial transactions that use boilerplate contracts, why (and whether) boilerplate contracts are so slow to change, why law firms do not generally have R&D departments, the resolution of the …
Contracts Meet Henry Ford, Barak D. Richman
Contracts Meet Henry Ford, Barak D. Richman
Faculty Scholarship
Legal scholars and legal educators view contracts as a welfare-maximizing (or optimal risk-allocating) device for two or more parties. Because we cling to this principal-driven paradigm, we think of lawyers only as the proverbial “transaction cost engineers,” the loyal agents of parties to a transaction. And whenever we observe contracts that appear to be suboptimal, we blame agency costs. We instead should apply the literature on organizational economics to understand the production of contracts by the modern law firm. This literature better illustrates how law firms organize, why they produce the products they do, and why those products sometimes exhibit …