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Commercial Law

Columbia Law School

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Commercial law

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Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Legal Design And The Evolution Of Commercial Norms, Jody S. Kraus Jan 1997

Legal Design And The Evolution Of Commercial Norms, Jody S. Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

The Uniform Commercial Code determines the content of most commercial law default rules by incorporating common merchant practices. The success of this incorporation strategy depends on the likely efficiency of evolved commercial practices. In this Article, I use the best available theory of cultural evolution to analyze how and why commercial practices evolve. This analysis confirms that the incorporation strategy is far superior to a system in which lawmakers rely predominantly on individual analysis and experimentation to design commercial law. But the analysis also demonstrates that common commercial practices, and the laws incorporating them, are unlikely to be optimal, in …


An Economic Analysis Of The Lost-Volume Retail Seller, Victor P. Goldberg Jan 1984

An Economic Analysis Of The Lost-Volume Retail Seller, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Suppose that a customer agrees to buy a boat and before it is delivered, he reneges. The dealer subsequently resells the boat to another customer at the same price. Has the seller suffered damages (aside from incidental damages) and, if so, should he be compensated? This question, dubbed the lost-volume seller problem, has been the subject of considerable legal analysis, usually in the context of explicating section 2-708(2) of the Uniform Commercial Code (U.C.C.). There have been a number of attempts to apply economic analysis to this difficult question, the most recent by Professors Goetz and Scott. Unfortunately, the economic …