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Exploring (Social) Class In The Classroom: The Case Of Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, Miriam A. Cherry
Exploring (Social) Class In The Classroom: The Case Of Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, Miriam A. Cherry
Faculty Publications
(Excerpt)
Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon (the "Lucy Case") presents a rich teaching vehicle for the first year of contracts for multiple reasons. Another participant in this symposium has discussed the Lucy Case to laud its value in teaching fact analysis or issue spotting. Others have commented upon the case for its doctrinal utility in explaining the concepts of illusory contracts, exclusive dealing and best efforts. The historical background, the opinions of Benjamin Cardozo and the opportunity to introduce feminist jurisprudence and law and economics concepts into the first year course are also fertile ground for discussion. Knowing …
Dangers Of Deference To Form Arbitration Provisions, Amy J. Schmitz
Dangers Of Deference To Form Arbitration Provisions, Amy J. Schmitz
Faculty Publications
This Article is part of my larger project exploring what I call "contracting culture," which borrows from legal realism and relational contract theory by considering contextual factors such as negotiators' relations, understandings, and values. As part of this project, I am pursuing various threads, including empirical studies of how contracting realities impact arbitration. In this Article, however, I focus on how these realities in business to consumer contracts combine with the Federal Arbitration Act and formulaic contract law to foster dangerous deference to form arbitration provisions. The Article then invites procedural reforms and offers suggestions for regulations aimed to temper …
The Failure Of Economic Interpretations Of The Law Of Contact Damages, Nathan B. Oman
The Failure Of Economic Interpretations Of The Law Of Contact Damages, Nathan B. Oman
Faculty Publications
The law of contracts is complex but remarkably stable. What we lack is a widely accepted interpretation of that law as embodying a coherent set of normative choices. Some scholars have suggested that either economic efficiency or personal autonomy provide unifying principles of contract law. These two approaches, however, seem incommensurable, which suggests that we must reject at least one of them in order to have a coherent theory. This Article dissents from this view and has a simple thesis: Economic accounts of the current doctrine governing contract damages have failed, but efficiency arguments remain key to any adequate theory …
Plain Meaning Vs. Broad Interpretation: How The Risk Of Opportunism Defeats A Unitary Default Rule For Interpretation, Juliet P. Kostritsky
Plain Meaning Vs. Broad Interpretation: How The Risk Of Opportunism Defeats A Unitary Default Rule For Interpretation, Juliet P. Kostritsky
Faculty Publications
The problem of contract interpretation presents courts with significant questions about the nature and methodology of judicial intervention into privately arranged affairs. The court often assumes an active role in interpreting the words of a written contract in part because words have more than one meaning or because a contract is incomplete. When a court chooses amongst variable meanings, or interprets contracts to craft limitations on parties' behavior when express limits do not exist, its choice must be then justified using a framework explored in this essay.
Traditionally, commentators have advocated one of two general approaches to supply the methodology …
Guerilla Terms, Peter A. Alces
Williston As Conservative-Pragmatist, Mark L. Movsesian
Williston As Conservative-Pragmatist, Mark L. Movsesian
Faculty Publications
In her pathbreaking article, "Restatement and Reform: A New Perspective on the Origins of the American Law Institute, Professor N.E.H. Hull rejects the conventional wisdom about the conservative, even reactionary, character of the First Restatements. The truth, she argues, is more subtle. The Restatements, and the larger ALI project of which they were a part, reflect the "'progressive-pragmatic"' worldview of the law professors most responsible for their creation. These professors were reformers. They rejected the formalism of earlier generations; for them, law was not a conceptual system but a practical tool for promoting beneficial social goals. They tempered their zeal …
Illegal Contacts And Efficient Deterrence: A Study In Modern Contract Theory, Juliet P. Kostritsky
Illegal Contacts And Efficient Deterrence: A Study In Modern Contract Theory, Juliet P. Kostritsky
Faculty Publications
This Article offers a unified theory that explains why courts, despite the compelling argument for deterrence, should not apply the no-effect rule of illegal contracts uniformly and why they should vary the type of relief according to the factual setting. It posits that a graduated relief structure will maximize efficient deterrence. An efficient deterrence scheme will preserve limited personal, judicial and societal resources without burdening legitimate transactions.
Judicial Incorporation Of Trade Usages: A Functional Solution To The Opportunism Problem, Juliet P. Kostritsky
Judicial Incorporation Of Trade Usages: A Functional Solution To The Opportunism Problem, Juliet P. Kostritsky
Faculty Publications
Article 2 of the UCC directed courts to look to business norms as a primary means of interpreting contracts. Recently the new formalists have attacked this strategy of norm incorporation as a misguided one that will lead inevitably to significant error costs. Accordingly, they have embraced plain meaning as the preferred interpretive strategy. This article argues that the strategy of rejecting trade usages unless they are part of the express contract is too rigid. The rejection is premised on an overly narrow cost/benefit analysis that fails to account for the functional role that such usages may play in curbing opportunistic …
Formalism In American Contract Law: Classical And Contemporary, Mark L. Movsesian
Formalism In American Contract Law: Classical And Contemporary, Mark L. Movsesian
Faculty Publications
It is a universally acknowledged truth that we live in a formalist era—at least when it comes to American contract law. Much more than the jurisprudence of a generation ago, today's cutting-edge work in American contract scholarship values the formalist virtues of bright-line rules, objective interpretation, and party autonomy. Policing bargains for substantive fairness seems more and more an outdated notion. Courts, it is thought, should refrain from interfering with market exchanges. Private arbitration has displaced courts in the context of many traditional contract disputes. Even adhesion contracts find their defenders, much to the chagrin of communitarian scholars.
This is …
Should Liability Play A Role In The Social Control Of Biobanks?, Larry I. Palmer
Should Liability Play A Role In The Social Control Of Biobanks?, Larry I. Palmer
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Symposium - Incomplete Contracts: Judicial Responses, Transactional Planning, And Litigation Strategies - Introduction, Juliet P. Kostritsky
Symposium - Incomplete Contracts: Judicial Responses, Transactional Planning, And Litigation Strategies - Introduction, Juliet P. Kostritsky
Faculty Publications
This introduction introduces three articles in a Symposium by Richard Craswell, Avery Katz, Robert Scott and George Triantis on the topic of incomplete contracts. The Symposium appears in 56 CASE WES. L. REV. 135 (2005).
The recognition that parties will often fail to achieve completely contingent contracts that provide for an optimal outcome in any future state of the world raises the important question of what role courts could or should play in such contracts.
Scholars working in the law-and-economics tradition have suggested that courts should use a hypothetical bargain approach to incompleteness, filling in terms that are optimal (efficient) …
Unity And Pluralism In Contract Law, Nathan B. Oman
Unity And Pluralism In Contract Law, Nathan B. Oman
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
On Discovering Doctrine: "Justice" In Contract Agreement, Peter A. Alces
On Discovering Doctrine: "Justice" In Contract Agreement, Peter A. Alces
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Corporations And Autonomy Theories Of Contract: A Critique Of The New Lex Mercatoria, Nathan B. Oman
Corporations And Autonomy Theories Of Contract: A Critique Of The New Lex Mercatoria, Nathan B. Oman
Faculty Publications
One of the central problems of contracts jurisprudence is the conflict between autonomy theories of contract and efficiency theories of contract. One approach to solving this conflict is to argue that in the realm of contracts between corporations, autonomy theories have nothing to say because corporations are not real people with whose autonomy we need to be concerned. While apparently powerful, this argument ultimately fails because it implicitly assumes theories of the corporation at odds with economic theories of law. Economics, in turn, offers a vision of the firm that is quite hospitable to autonomy theories of contract. The failure …
Rediscovering Williston, Mark L. Movsesian
Rediscovering Williston, Mark L. Movsesian
Faculty Publications
This Article is an intellectual history of classical contracts scholar Samuel Williston. Professor Movsesian argues that the conventional account of Williston's jurisprudence presents an incomplete and distorted picture. While much of Williston's work can strike a contemporary reader as arid and conceptual, there are strong elements of pragmatism as well. Williston insists that doctrine be justified in terms of real-world consequences, maintains that rules can have only presumptive force, and offers institutional explanations for judicial restraint. As a result, his scholarship shares more in common with today's new formalism than commonly supposed. Even the under-theorized quality of Williston's scholarship—to contemporary …
The Rise And Fall Of Promissory Estoppel Or Is Promissory Estoppel Really As Unsuccessful As Scholars Say It Is: A New Look At The Data, Juliet P. Kostritsky
The Rise And Fall Of Promissory Estoppel Or Is Promissory Estoppel Really As Unsuccessful As Scholars Say It Is: A New Look At The Data, Juliet P. Kostritsky
Faculty Publications
This article makes important contributions to the field of empirical promissory estoppel scholarship. First it challenges recent empirical scholarship (by Professors Robert Hillman and Sidney De Long in the 1998 and 1997 Columbia and Wisconsin law reviews). Their scholarship had challenged the view of the vast majority of American Contracts scholarship by proclaiming promissory estoppel to be an unimportant doctrine based on low win rates of tried cases. My article challenges this new orthodoxy based on a comprehensive five year survey of cases. It concludes that it is too soon to announce the death of promissory estoppel and that promissory …
Two Cheers For Freedom Of Contract, Mark L. Movsesian
Two Cheers For Freedom Of Contract, Mark L. Movsesian
Faculty Publications
Once, they say, freedom of contract reigned in American law. Parties could make agreements on a wide variety of subjects and choose the terms they wished. Courts would refrain from questioning the substance of bargains and would ensure only that parties had observed the proper formalities. In interpretation, objectivity was paramount. Courts would seek to ascertain, not what the parties had intended, but what a reasonable observer would understand the parties' words to mean. Contract law was a series of abstractions informed by individual autonomy and judicial deference.
This world, a classical paradise of doctrines with sharp corners, began to …
Contract Reconceived, Peter A. Alces
Tortious Interference And The Law Of Contract: The Case For Specific Performance Revisited, Deepa Varadarajan
Tortious Interference And The Law Of Contract: The Case For Specific Performance Revisited, Deepa Varadarajan
Faculty Publications
What is the role of contract law in remedying breach? The question of the appropriate legal remedy, specific performance versus money damages, has provided adequate fodder for three decades of debate in the law and economics discourse. In the legal discipline at large, the topic has spurred centuries of debate, as illustrated by Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous line: “The only universal consequence of a legally binding promise is, that the law makes the promisor pay damages if the promised event does not come to pass.” Holmes's approach to contractual remedy would evolve during the latter half of the twentieth century …
When Should Contract Law Supply A Liability Rule Or Term?: Framing A Principle Of Unification For Contracts, Juliet P. Kostritsky
When Should Contract Law Supply A Liability Rule Or Term?: Framing A Principle Of Unification For Contracts, Juliet P. Kostritsky
Faculty Publications
To demonstrate the need for a unified instrumental framework for deciding gaps and implying liability rules, Part II of this Article will first describe the competing visions of the role of law in contract gap-filling. Although each vision has expanded the ways in which we think about contracts and has offered more realistic models of bargaining, each still fails to offer a unified framework for deciding how courts should decide *1290 incomplete contracts. Part III of the Article outlines the methodological framework for unifying judicial approaches to law-supplied terms or rules. The framework will incorporate a: (1) realistic model of …
Regret And Contract "Science", Peter A. Alces
Regret And Contract "Science", Peter A. Alces
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Myths, Miscues, And Misconceptions: No-Aid Separationism And The Establishment Clause, Carl H. Esbeck
Myths, Miscues, And Misconceptions: No-Aid Separationism And The Establishment Clause, Carl H. Esbeck
Faculty Publications
In neutrality theory the recipients of vouchers, grants, and purchase-of-service contracts are eligible to participate as providers in government social service programs without regard to their religious character. Indeed, religious beliefs and practices are prohibited bases for screening out those who want to be welfare program providers. Notable examples of congressional social service legislation conforming to the rule of religious neutrality are the ‘charitable choice‘ feature imbedded in the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 and the Community Services Block Grant Act of 1998, as well as the provision allowing issuance of child care vouchers to indigent parents in the Child …
Are Statutes Really "Legislative Bargains"? The Failure Of The Contract Analogy In Statutory Interpretation, Mark L. Movsesian
Are Statutes Really "Legislative Bargains"? The Failure Of The Contract Analogy In Statutory Interpretation, Mark L. Movsesian
Faculty Publications
Recent scholarship draws an analogy between contract and statutory interpretation. In this Article, Professor Movsesian explores and rejects that analogy. There are key differences between contracts and statutes, he argues; the intentionalism of contemporary contract law is inappropriate in the context of statutory interpretation. After critically examining the literature on the topic and demonstrating the operative distinctions between contracts and statutes, Professor Movsesian provides a useful illustration in the form of the famous case of Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States. Professor Movsesian shows how a comparison of contract and statutory interpretation sheds light on a number of …
Mandatory Arbitration: Alternative Dispute Resolution Or Coercive Dispute Suppression?, Sharona Hoffman
Mandatory Arbitration: Alternative Dispute Resolution Or Coercive Dispute Suppression?, Sharona Hoffman
Faculty Publications
The enforceability of mandatory arbitration policies contained in employment contracts between employees and their direct employers remains an open question, even after the Supreme Court's 1991 decision in Gilmer v. Interstate Johnson Lane Corp. While Gilmer gave effect to a mandatory arbitration clause in a contract between a securities broker and his licensing exchange, the Court noted that the contract at issue was not an ordinary employment contract between employer and employee. The Court declined to decide whether arbitration agreements in ordinary employment contracts are per se enforceable under the Federal Arbitration Act or whether these provisions are exempt from …
Severability In Statutes And Contracts, Mark L. Movsesian
Severability In Statutes And Contracts, Mark L. Movsesian
Faculty Publications
Established doctrine on the severability of unconstitutional statutory provisions has drawn criticism on almost every conceivable basis. Commentators have condemned severability doctrine as too malleable and as too rigid; as encouraging judicial overreaching and as encouraging judicial abdication. They have criticized the doctrine's reliance on legislative intent and its disregard of legislative intent; its excessive attention to political concerns and its inattention to political concerns; its lack of any coherent explanation.
The reasons for this lingering controversy are easy to discern. One is purely pragmatic. "We live in an age of statutes." Legislation provides our primary source of law in …
Wrong Side Of The Mountain: A Comment On Bad Faith's Unnatural History, Robert H. Jerry Ii
Wrong Side Of The Mountain: A Comment On Bad Faith's Unnatural History, Robert H. Jerry Ii
Faculty Publications
In this Comment, I will argue that courts have ignored bad faith's contractual heritage and have undervalued contract law's ability to respond to insurer misconduct. To draw upon Professor Powers's thoughtful analysis, I believe that courts invoked the tort paradigm before it was clear that the contract paradigm was inadequate. For lack of data, I will stop short of recommending where we should go from here, but I will suggest that our behavior in the face of bad faith liability in tort may have changed no less than the environment and that the perceived relative calm in the tort's current …
A Pragmatic Strategy For The Scope Of Sales Law, The Statute Of Frauds, And The Global Currency Bazaar, Raj Bhala
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Statutory Personal Property Lease Law In Alabama, Peter A. Alces, P. Cade Newman
Statutory Personal Property Lease Law In Alabama, Peter A. Alces, P. Cade Newman
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
The Efficacy Of Guaranty Contracts In Sophisticated Commercial Transactions, Peter A. Alces
The Efficacy Of Guaranty Contracts In Sophisticated Commercial Transactions, Peter A. Alces
Faculty Publications
Even though contracts of guaranty are not subject to uniform standards of interpretation throughout the states, both case law and statutory development have tended to evidence a strong sympathy for the guarantor. In spite of this trend, Professor Alces suggests that creditors' counsel can, through careful drafting, do much to assure the enforceability of the guaranty contract. A scrupulously structured guaranty contract, one that anticipates possible defenses to liability in explicit terms, may well be upheld, even in cases in which guarantors occupied weak negotiating positions vis-a-vis creditors. Moreover, the attack on the guaranty as a fraudulent conveyance under section …
Punitive Damages In The Law Of Contract: The Reality And The Illusion Of Legal Change, Timothy J. Sullivan
Punitive Damages In The Law Of Contract: The Reality And The Illusion Of Legal Change, Timothy J. Sullivan
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.