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Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Law
Contracts Confidential: Ending Secret Deals In The Extractive Industries, Peter Rosenblum, Susan Maples
Contracts Confidential: Ending Secret Deals In The Extractive Industries, Peter Rosenblum, Susan Maples
Human Rights Institute
The laws of contract and international commercial relations generally suppose two corporate entities doing business with each other, both seeking profits and answering to shareholders. This makes sense, unless one of the parties is not a corporate entity, but rather a government, answerable to citizens. Even as they conduct business, governments have duties, obligations and interests that go well beyond pure profit maximization. As such, the same secrecy afforded to contracting parties in commercial law is out of place in such contracts. Governments must be held accountable for all contracts they enter, be they for the provision of roads or …
Hoffman V. Red Owl Stores And The Limits Of The Legal Method, Robert E. Scott
Hoffman V. Red Owl Stores And The Limits Of The Legal Method, Robert E. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
According to the overwhelming majority view, promissory estoppel is not an appropriate ground for legally enforcing statements made during preliminary negotiations unless there is a “clear and unambiguous promise” on which the counterparty reasonably and foreseeably relies. Bill Whitford and Stewart Macaulay were among the first scholars to note the apparent absence of such a promise in the case of Hoffman v. Red Owl Stores. Several years ago, after studying the trial record, I concluded that the best explanation for the breakdown in negotiations was the fundamental misunderstanding between the parties as to the amount and nature of Hoffmann’s …
Origin Myths, Contracts, And The Hunt For Pari Passu, Mark C. Weidemaier, Robert E. Scott, G. Mitu Gulati
Origin Myths, Contracts, And The Hunt For Pari Passu, Mark C. Weidemaier, Robert E. Scott, G. Mitu Gulati
Faculty Scholarship
Sovereign loans involve complex but largely standardized contracts, and these include some terms that no one understands. Lawyers often account for the existence of these terms through origin myths. Focusing on one contract term, the pari passu clause, this article explores two puzzling aspects of these myths. First, it demonstrates that the myths are inaccurate as to both the clause’s origin and the role of lawyers in contract drafting. Second, the myths often are unflattering, inaccurately portraying lawyers as engaged in little more than rote copying. The article probes this disjunction between the myths and lawyers’ actual practices and explores …
Excuse Doctrine: The Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Victor P. Goldberg
Excuse Doctrine: The Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Victor P. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
The world is in a bit of a mess. Oil prices soared to more than $140 per barrel and within months plummeted to below $40. The pound fell from $2 to less than $1.40. Housing and stock prices crashed. Foreclosures, bankruptcies, and bailouts became newspaper staples. When things go awry like this, inevitably many people and firms regret having entered into contracts under more favorable circumstances. Many of them will be looking for ways to limit, or better yet, avoid the consequences. A preeminent contracts scholar, Melvin Eisenberg (2009), has provided them with considerable ammunition in a recent paper, arguing …
"The Sole Right ... Shall Return To The Authors": Anglo-American Authors' Reversion Rights From The Statute Of Anne To Contemporary U.S. Copyright, Lionel Bently, Jane C. Ginsburg
"The Sole Right ... Shall Return To The Authors": Anglo-American Authors' Reversion Rights From The Statute Of Anne To Contemporary U.S. Copyright, Lionel Bently, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
The rise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of a professional class of writers stimulated authors' demands for better remuneration from their writings. The increase in authors who sought to live from their work, rather than from patronage or personal fortune, likely provided at least one impulse for the author-protective provisions of the 1710 Statute of Anne. Under the regime of printing privileges that preceded the Statute of Anne, authors generally received from publisher-booksellers a one-time payment, made when the authors surrendered their manuscripts for publication. Authors whose works enjoyed particularly high demand might negotiate additional payments for new editions …
Braiding: The Interaction Of Formal And Informal Contracting In Theory, Practice, And Doctrine, Ronald J. Gilson, Charles F. Sabel, Robert E. Scott
Braiding: The Interaction Of Formal And Informal Contracting In Theory, Practice, And Doctrine, Ronald J. Gilson, Charles F. Sabel, Robert E. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
This Article studies the relationship between formal and informal contract enforcement. The theoretical literature treats the two strategies as separate phenomena. By contrast, a rich experimental literature considers whether the introduction of formal contracting and state enforcement "crowds out" the operation of informal contracting. Both literatures focus too narrowly on how formal contracts create incentives for parties to perfom substantive actions, while assuming that informal enforcement depends on preexisting levels of trust. As a result, current scholarship misses the relationship between formal and informal contract mechanisms that characterizes contemporary contracting in practice. Parties respond to rising uncertainty by writing contracts …
Contract Interpretation Redux, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott
Contract Interpretation Redux, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
Contract interpretation remains the largest single source of contract litigation between business firms. In part this is because contract interpretation issues are difficult, but it also reflects a deep divide between textualist and contextualist theories of interpretation. While a strong majority of U.S. courts continue to follow the traditional, "formalist" approach to contract interpretation, some courts and most commentators prefer the "contextualist" interpretive principles that are reflected in the Uniform Commercial Code and the Second Restatement. In 2003, we published an article that set out a formalist theory of contract interpretation to govern agreements between business firms. We argued that, …