Law Commons^™

Defects In Consent And Dividing The Benefit Of The Bargain: Recent Developments, Jeffrey Harrison

Jeffrey L Harrison

Contract law professors and students, attorneys, judges know that discussions about consent are rarely about consent. This results from three factors. First, it is the appearance of consent that is necessary to form a contract. Second, not every manifestation of consent is sufficient to create a contract that cannot be avoided. Third, interpretations of consent have the potential to allow courts to intervene when the benefit of the bargain is seen to be unfairly divided or one of the parties is actually worse off as a result of the contract. This Article assesses the extent to which recent decisions about …

Resolving The Paradox Of The Consideration Doctrine: The Implications Of Inefficient Signaling And Of Anti-Commodification Norms

David Gamage

This paper addresses one of the central problems of contract law, a puzzle that has troubled generations of contracts scholars: Why do we only enforce promises backed by consideration? Or, how can we justify insisting on the bargain context, but not requiring that the bargains be adequate? The lack of a theoretical solution to this puzzle has plagued the application of the consideration doctrine in courts of law.

We resolve this paradox through two innovations. First, using a game theory model based on asymmetric information, we dispute the common wisdom that the law should honor parties’ intentions as articulated at …

Commodification And Contract Formation: Placing The Consideration Doctrine On Stronger Foundations

David Gamage

Under the traditional consideration doctrine, a promise is only legally enforceable if it is made in exchange for something of value. This doctrine lies at the heart of contract law, yet it lacks a sound theoretical justification – a fact that has confounded generations of scholars and created a mess of case law. This paper argues that the failure of traditional justifications for the doctrine comes from two mistaken assumptions. First, previous scholars have assumed that anyone can back a promise with nominal consideration if they wish to do so. We show how social norms against commodification limit the availability …

Dirty Debts Sold Dirt Cheap, Dalie Jimenez

Dalie Jimenez

More than 77 million Americans have a debt in collections. Many of these debts will be sold to debt buyers for pennies, or fractions of pennies, on the dollar. This Article details the perilous path that debts travel as they move through the collection ecosystem. Using a unique dataset of 84 consumer debt purchase and sale agreement, it examines the manner in which debts are sold, oftentimes as simple data on a spreadsheet, devoid of any documentary evidence. It finds that in many contracts, sellers disclaim all warranties about the underlying debts sold or the information transferred. Sellers also sometimes …

Carnival Cruise And The Contracting Of Everything, Nancy Kim

Nancy Kim

This short essay is about the potential unconscionablity of contracts between cruise lines and passengers.

Two Alternate Visions Of Contract Law In 2025, Nancy Kim

Nancy Kim

Part I of this essay examines how businesses have shaped the evolution of contract’s form from the past to the present and ex-plains how courts have responded by reshaping contract law.1 Part II of this essay anticipates changes in the business landscape and explains how these changes might create new challenges for contract law. Part III predicts two alternative visions for contract law in 2025. The first is as a diminished body of law, made nearly irrelevant by other laws and preempted by private rules administered by non-judicial entities. The second vision is that of a robust contract law administered …

Bargaining Power And Background Law, Nancy Kim

Nancy Kim

Power in contract law typically refers to the bargaining strength of each contracting party in relation to the other. In assessing the relative bargaining power of each party, courts and commentators often consider factors specific to the parties, such as socio-economic status and education level. In this Essay, I suggest another factor that affects the power of the parties in negotiating or modifying their agreement, one that I refer to as the "background law." The background law is the substantive law that governs the subject matter of the contract. This Essay focuses specifically on the background law of copyrights and …

Notice, Assent, And Form In A 140 Character World, Juliet Moringiello

Juliet M Moringiello

This essay is a contribution to a symposium on Professor Nancy Kim’s terrific book, Wrap Contracts: Foundations and Ramifications. In the book, Prof. Kim examines this explosion in volume of online contract terms and offers some suggestions for improving the judicial approach to these terms. Despite the ease of presenting online terms in a visually appealing format, today’s electronically presented terms are even less comprehensible than those of fifteen years ago. At the same time that individuals have become accustomed to receiving information in small doses due to the proliferation of social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and …

Engagement Rings Are Barbaric, Margaret Brinig

Margaret F Brinig

Margaret Brinig was quoted in the Salon magazine article Engagement rings are barbaric

By Shannon Rupp

"The real reason for engagement rings wasn’t lost on people of that era, however, as legal scholar Margaret Brinig noted when she researched the history of breach of promise laws. With the abolition of those laws in the 1930s came an increase in the sales of engagement rings to the masses."

Love And Contracts In Don Quixote, Martha Ertman

Martha M. Ertman

Viewing love as a contract seems, initially, like mistaking windmills for giants, or a peasant girl for a grand lady. This chapter seeks, like Don Quixote, to convince readers to suspend their practiced views of everyday relationships in order to see them in a new light. What seems crazy at first glance may come to look as good, and sometimes better, than the more conventional view. As a law professor, I usually write about love and contracts by focusing on legal opinions and statutes, and recently I have added real-life stories from books and newspapers, as well as my …

From Lord Coke To Internet Privacy: The Past, Present, And Future Of The Law Of Internet Contracting, Juliet Moringiello, William Reynolds

Juliet M Moringiello

Contract law is applied countless times every day, in every manner of transaction large or small. Rarely are those transactions reflected in an agreement produced by a lawyer; quite the contrary, almost all contracts are concluded by persons with no legal training and often by persons who do not have a great deal of education. In recent years, moreover, technological advances have provided novel methods of creating contracts. Those facts present practitioners of contract law with an interesting conundrum: The law must be sensible and stable if parties are to have confidence in the security of their arrangements; but contract …

The Lost Controversy Limitation Of The Federal Arbitration Act, Stephen Friedman

Stephen E Friedman

Despite Congress’s deliberate limitation of the Federal Arbitration Act (the “FAA”) to disputes arising out of a contract containing an arbitration provision, broader arbitration provisions are ubiquitous. Courts invariably enforce such provisions under the FAA. Notably, the Supreme Court has almost entirely disregarded the relevant language of the FAA and has ignored the conflict between the FAA’s narrow language and the broad language typically found in arbitration provisions. In so doing, the Court has quietly and inappropriately elevated the language of private agreements above the language of the statute. In this article, Professor Friedman first identifies the origin of the …

Contracting Law, Deborah Post, Amy Kastely, Nancy Ota, Sharon Hom

Deborah W. Post

Revised and updated to 2006, the fourth edition of Contracting Law continues the clear explanations of contract doctrine, engaging cases, and thought-provoking cultural and historical materials that have made this casebook a favorite of students and professors. Students and faculty appreciate the fact that no separate statutory supplement is necessary. Selected provisions from the Restatement Second of Contracts and the Uniform Commercial Code are included in the casebook as appendices. The workbook (purchased separately), complete with flow charts, vocabulary lists, problems and structured exercises, helps students understand legal doctrines, case briefing, and synthesis. Students can use the workbook independently or …

Rethinking Commodification: Cases And Readings In Law And Culture, Martha Ertman, Joan Williams

Martha M. Ertman

What is the price of a limb? A child? Ethnicity? Love? In a world that is often ruled by buyers and sellers, those things that are often considered priceless become objects to be marketed and from which to earn a profit. Ranging from black market babies to exploitative sex trade operations to the marketing of race and culture, Rethinking Commodification presents an interdisciplinary collection of writings, including legal theory, case law, and original essays to reexamine the traditional legal question: ̶To commodify or not to commodify?” In this pathbreaking course reader, Martha M. Ertman and Joan C. Williams present the …

A Pro-Congress Approach To Arbitration And Unconscionability, Stephen Friedman

Stephen E Friedman

This Essay endeavors to resolve a current controversy involving the application of the unconscionability doctrine to arbitration agreements. The pro-arbitration policies of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) and the anti-arbitration instincts of the unconscionability doctrine are difficult to reconcile. Instead of clarity in this area of law, we have a series of hints and clues, often contradictory, from the Supreme Court. Although Professor David Horton and I share a desire to clarify this area of the law, we have nearly opposite views about how this should be accomplished. This Essay sets forth my position and also responds to Unconscionability Wars, …

Testamentary Substitutes—A Time For Statutory Clarification, Sidney Kwestel, Rena Seplowitz

Rena C. Seplowitz

No abstract provided.

Testamentary Substitutes—A Time For Statutory Clarification, Sidney Kwestel, Rena Seplowitz

Sidney Kwestel

No abstract provided.

Student Film: Jacobs And Young Inc., V. George Kent, Ara Ayvazian, Ashley Haelen, Peggy Zabakolas, Larry Przetakiewicz, Michael Barchak, Andrew Koster, Cristina Puglia, Deborah Post

Deborah W. Post

No abstract provided.

Arbitration Provisions: Little Darlings And Little Monsters, Stephen Friedman

Stephen E Friedman

This Article takes a new approach to resolving the growing tension between the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) and the unconscionability doctrine. While arbitration provisions are favored under the FAA, they are viewed far more skeptically by courts applying unconscionability to refuse enforcement of one-sided arbitration provisions. This tension, which has increased dramatically in recent years, represents a major fault line in contract law. Jurisprudence and commentary on this issue have assumed that courts have the authority to apply the unconscionability doctrine to arbitration provisions. This Article refutes that assumption, taking the position that Congress, in passing the FAA, removed from …

What’S Software Got To Do With It? The Ali Principles Of The Law Of Software Contracts, Juliet Moringiello, William Reynolds

Juliet M Moringiello

In May, 2009, the American Law Institute (“ALI”) approved its Principles of the Law of Software Contracts (“Principles”). The attempt to codify, or at least unify, the law of software contracts has a long and contentious history, the roots of which can be found in the attempt to add an Article 2B to the Uniform Commercial Code (“UCC”) in the mid-1990s. Article 2B became the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (“UCITA”) when the ALI withdrew from the project in 1999, and UCITA became the law in only two states, Virginia and Maryland. UCITA became a dirty word, with several states …

Electronic Contracting Cases 2009-2010, Juliet Moringiello, William Reynolds

Juliet M Moringiello

This article, our sixth annual survey of electronic contracting cases, discusses the significant electronic contracting cases decided between June 15, 2009 and June 15, 2010. Over the past six years, the law of electronic contracts has matured, and the cases we discuss in this article show this maturation. The survey covers contract formation by the use of shrinkwrap, clickwrap and browsewrap terms, and contract formation by the exchange of e-mail messages.

Giving Unconscionability More Muscle: Attorney’S Fees As A Remedy For Contractual Overreaching, Stephen E. Friedman

Stephen E Friedman

This Article seeks to broaden the conversation about unconscionability. While most of the discussion has focused on the appropriate standard for determining unconscionability, this Article focuses on the appropriate remedy to be imposed when unconscionability is found. The current remedy for unconscionability is non-enforcement or limited enforcement of unconscionable contracts or contract terms. This remedy is inadequate and seriously undermines unconscionability’s effectiveness as a tool for policing against contractual overreaching. The Article proposes that courts be given discretion to award attorney’s fees to consumers who successfully establish the unconscionability of a standard form contract. Such a remedy would enable unconscionability …