Law Commons^™

Boilerplate’S False Dichotomy, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

The argument against enforcing boilerplate contracts (contracts that no one reads) seems clear. Indeed, if this were a court case we would say that the jury is in; the evidence against boilerplate is overwhelming. Yet the judge has yet to render judgment. Courts continue to enforce boilerplate terms, and even those scholars who have exposed boilerplate as an emperor with no clothes are reluctant to gaze upon its nakedness and condemn its use.

This reluctance originates in an assumption that pervades the boilerplate debate—namely, that courts and commentators alike view boilerplate as necessary to the modern transaction. When asked to …

Keeping Promises And Meeting Needs: Public Charities At A Crossroads, Allison Anna Tait

Law Faculty Publications

When a charitable organization cannot fulfill the terms of a charitable gift agreement, it must decide whether to keep a promise or meet a need. That is to say, a charitable organization can either preserve original donor intent, adhering to conditions placed on a gift, or it can attempt to modify the terms of the gift in order to budget and spend the funds more effectively. If an institution chooses to keep a promise, it might be stuck with a fund it cannot use because of conditions placed on the money at the time of the gift. In order to …

Bespoke Discovery, Jessica Erickson

Law Faculty Publications

The U.S. legal system gives contracting parties significant freedom to customize the procedures that will govern their future disputes. With forum selection clauses, parties can decide where they will litigate future disputes. With fee-shifting provisions, they can choose who will pay for these suits. And with arbitration clauses, they can make upfront decisions to opt out of the traditional legal system altogether. Parties can also waive their right to appeal, their right to a jury trial, and their right to file a class action. Bespoke procedure, in other words, is commonplace in the United States.

Far less common, however, are …

An App For Third Party Beneficiaries, David G. Epstein

Law Faculty Publications

Every year, more than 100 reported court opinions consider the question of whether an outsider can sue for damages under a contract made by others-in part because the law is so ambiguous. While contract enforcement by a third party is controlled largely by the facts of the particular case, it also materially depends upon the relevant legal standards. At present, not just the standards, but also the reasons for these standards, are unclear. Eighty years ago, Lon Fuller, a professor teaching contracts at a then-Southern law school, and William Perdue, a student at that school, significantly clarified and improved decision …

Internet Giants As Quasi-Governmental Actors And The Limits Of Contractual Consent, D. A. Jeremy Telman

Law Faculty Publications

Although the government’s data-mining program relied heavily on information and technology that the government received from private companies, relatively little of the public outrage generated by Edward Snowden’s revelations was directed at those private companies. We argue that the mystique of the Internet giants and the myth of contractual consent combine to mute criticisms that otherwise might be directed at the real data-mining masterminds. As a result, consumers are deemed to have consented to the use of their private information in ways that they would not agree to had they known the purposes to which their information would be put …

Vertical Boilerplate, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

Despite what we learn in law school about the “meeting of the minds,” most contracts are merely boilerplate—take-it-or-leave-it propositions. Negotiation is nonexistent; we rely on our collective market power as consumers to regulate contracts’ content. But boilerplate imposes certain information costs because it often arrives late in the transaction and is hard to understand. If those costs get too high, then the market mechanism fails. So how high are boilerplate’s information costs? A few studies have attempted to measure them, but they all use a “horizontal” approach—i.e., they sample a single stratum of boilerplate and assume that it represents the …

On The Conflation Of The State Secrets Privilege And The Totten Doctrine, D. A. Jeremy Telman

Law Faculty Publications

The state secrets privilege (SSP) has become a major hindrance to litigation that seeks to challenge abuses of executive power in the context of the War on Terror. The Supreme Court first embraced and gave shape to the SSP as an evidentiary privilege in a 1953 case, United States v. Reynolds. Increasingly, the government relies on the SSP to seek pre-discovery dismissal of suits alleging torts and constitutional violations by the government. Lower federal courts have permitted such pre-discovery dismissal because they have confused the SSP with a non-justiciability doctrine derived from an 1875 case, Totten v. United States …

Langdellian Limericks, D. A. Jeremy Telman

Law Faculty Publications

Christopher Columbus Langdell Used cases to teach the law well. So everyone thought, Except for distraught Students in Socratic hell.

Theirs is no lone cri de coeur. Now bashing Langdell’s de rigueur. Knowing case law alone, A young lawyer is prone To resemble a high-priced poseur.

After a part that rehearses Anti-Langdellian curses; The Author proceeds To attend to the needs Of students who learn best through verses.

Narrative And The Origins Of Law, Allison Anna Tait, Luke P. Norris

Law Faculty Publications

In order to understand these distinct narratives of legal origin through the tools of narratology, we will proceed in several steps. First, we will define more precisely the set of social contract theories that we consider. We will discuss our decision to narrow the focus down to two social contract theorists in particular, one contemporary and one classical, John Rawls and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. These two theorists seem worlds apart in many respects—yet the tools of narratology will enable us to see their shared enterprise. Second, the tools of narratology will help us to identify and discuss the component parts that …

Insurance Binders Revisited, Peter N. Swisher

Law Faculty Publications

Temporary contracts of insurance-binders-protect the insured during the time between completion of the application and issuance of the policy. They are an accepted and necessary part of the insurance business, used in connection with a wide variety of insurance P7:oducts. But when alleged coverage under a binder is the subject of litigation, the results are often inconsistent and, sometimes, indefensible. This article provides a comprehensive discussion of binders, including the differences between standard form and manuscript binders, binding receipts in property and casualty insurance and conditional receipts in life insurance policies, the various kinds of conditional receipts, and otherwise. The …

Commercial Codification As Negotiation, David Frisch

Law Faculty Publications

Part I of this Article endeavors to put the sales law in perspective by emphasizing its role in the broader system of commercial law. Then, in Part II we focus on a particular example (the buyer's right to recover goods upon the seller's insolvency) to support our general observation that the revision reflects a fatal insensitivity to the need for article 2 to fit with other bodies of commercial codification. Part III demonstrates the revi~ion's failure to come to terms with the role of context and makes the argument that the drafters' shortsightedness is evidenced by the manner in which …

Property, W. Wade Berryhill

Law Faculty Publications

The 1986 General Assembly may be remembered as much for what it did not do as for what it did. Carried over into the next session was House Bill 810, which would have abolished dower and curtesy in favor of a statutory share for the surviving spouse in the deceased spouse's estate. Of course, passage of this bill would have ushered in significant change in the practice of decedents' estates. Significantly, passage of the bill also would have legislatively overruled recent judicial and legislative activity which has created the sole and separate estate, for both female and male, allowing circumvention …