Law Commons^™

Meeting Summary Of Colloquium On Policy, Law, Contracts, And Sustainable Development, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

In November 2014, CCSI and the Institute for Human Rights and Business co-convened a colloquium on policy, law, contracts, and sustainable development, with a particular focus on large-scale investments in the extractive industries and the agriculture sector. The colloquium provided an opportunity for practitioners to share information on their related work, as well as to reflect on current practices and remaining gaps regarding efforts to embed sustainability and human rights into large-scale deals. This outcome document provides a summary of the discussion, while its annex includes information on participants’ relevant programs, initiatives, and tools.

State Contract Law And Debt Contracts, Colleen Honigsberg, Sharon Katz, Gil Sadka

Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership

This paper examines the relationship between debt contracts and state contract law. We first develop an index to evaluate whether each state’s law is favorable or unfavorable to lenders. We then analyze how the contract terms, the frequency of covenant violations, and the repercussions of covenant violations vary across states. We find that cash collateral is most likely to be used when the contract is governed by law that is favorable to debtors and that out-of-state borrowers who use favorable law pay higher yield spreads. In addition, when the law is favorable to lenders, there are significantly fewer covenant violations, …

Contract Theory – Who Needs It?, Avery W. Katz

Faculty Scholarship

Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause – that it must be lived forward.
Soren Kierkegaard

Both law students and law teachers have traditionally been drawn to conceptual projects that attempt to systematize the field of contract law. The reasons for this are easy to see: the field is doctrinally complex, few beginning students have any substantial experience with the kinds of fact patterns that arise in the cases, and the law is a locus of contestation over fundamental issues of economic liberalism that go to the heart …

Protecting Reliance, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Reliance plays a central role in contract law and scholarship. One party relies on the other's promised performance, its statements, or its anticipated entry into a formal agreement. Saying that reliance is important, however, says nothing about what we should do about it. The focus of this Essay is on the many ways that parties choose to protect reliance. The relationship between what parties do and what contract doctrine cares about is tenuous at best. Contract performance takes place over time, and the nature of the parties 'future obligations can be deferred to take into account changing circumstances. Reliance matters …

Text And Context: Contract Interpretation As Contract Design, Ronald J. Gilson, Charles F. Sabel, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Contract interpretation remains the most important source of commercial litigation and the most contentious area of contemporary contract doctrine and scholarship. Two polar positions have competed for dominance in contract interpretation. In a textualist regime, generalist courts cannot consider context; in a contextualist regime, they must. Underlying this dispute are contrary assumptions about the prototypical contract each interpretive style addresses. For modern textualists, contracts are bespoke, between legally sophisticated parties who embed as much or as little of the contractual context as they wish in an integrated writing and prefer to protect their choices against judicial interference by an interpretive …

The Future Of Many Contracts, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Forty years ago, my former colleague, the late Ian Macneil, published an article entitled The Many Futures of Contracts. When I was asked to contribute to this symposium on what contract law might look like in 2025, the play on words was too good to resist. Professor Macneil developed the notion of "relational contracts," emphasizing the limits of classical contract law in dealing with long-term contractual relations. His work had a strong influence on scholarship, including my work. The notion that many contractual relationships are long-lived and require some form of adaptation as circumstances change and new information becomes available …