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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
The Political Economy Of "Constitutional Political Economy", Jeremy K. Kessler
The Political Economy Of "Constitutional Political Economy", Jeremy K. Kessler
Faculty Scholarship
Since the early 1990s, constitutional history has experienced a renaissance. This revival had many causes, but three stand out: the Rehnquist Court's attack on formerly sacrosanct features of the "New Deal agenda"; Reagan-Era reassessments of American political development by political scientists, historians, and historical sociologists; and the frustration of constitutional scholars with the inability of legal process theory or political philosophy to produce "authoritative constitutional principles." Spurred by legal crisis and this mix of disciplinary innovation and stagnation, law professors began to tell new stories about our constitutional heritage. They focused on the sources and significance of the New Deal's …
The Productive Tension Between Official And Unofficial Stories Of Fault In Contract Law, Martha M. Ertman
The Productive Tension Between Official And Unofficial Stories Of Fault In Contract Law, Martha M. Ertman
Faculty Scholarship
Officially Contract law ignores fault. However, an unofficial story complements the official one, and explains why fault occasionally slips into contract law through doctrines such as willful breach. This chapter of FAULT IN AMERICAN CONTRACT LAW (Omri Ben-Shahar & Ariel Porot, eds, Cambridge U. Press, forthcoming 2010) argues that the official and unofficial stories operate in productive tension to both facilitate ex ante planning and, when necessary, look backward at reasons for breach to reach a just result. The occasional presence of fault in contract law, in this view, represents merely one more instance of the common doctrinal pattern of …