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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Law
Derivatives And The Bankruptcy Code: Why The Special Treatment?, Franklin R. Edwards, Edward R. Morrison
Derivatives And The Bankruptcy Code: Why The Special Treatment?, Franklin R. Edwards, Edward R. Morrison
Faculty Scholarship
The collapse of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) in Fall 1998 and the Federal Reserve Bank's subsequent efforts to orchestrate a bailout raise important questions about the structure of the Bankruptcy Code. The Code contains numerous provisions affording special treatment to financial derivatives contracts, the most important of which exempts these contracts from the "automatic stay" and permits counterparties to terminate derivatives contracts with a debtor in bankruptcy and seize underlying collateral. No other counterparty or creditor of the debtor has such freedom; to the contrary, the automatic stay prohibits them from undertaking any act that threatens the debtor's assets. …
Contractual Incompleteness: A Transactional Perspective, Avery W. Katz
Contractual Incompleteness: A Transactional Perspective, Avery W. Katz
Faculty Scholarship
Recent scholarship in the field of contract law has concentrated on contractual incompleteness-that is, on the fact that except in the simplest and most basic transactions, contracting parties do not work out all of the relevant details and contingencies of their relationship at the outset. The reasons for incomplete contracts are varied. Sometimes parties deliberately leave terms unresolved, trusting future negotiations or social norms to fill in any problems that emerge. Other times, they leave terms unresolved without realizing they have done so, in part because they devote limited attention or resources to their negotiations and in part because contracts …
Incomplete Contracts And The Theory Of Contract Design, Robert E. Scott, George G. Triantis
Incomplete Contracts And The Theory Of Contract Design, Robert E. Scott, George G. Triantis
Faculty Scholarship
We are delighted to accept this invitation to write a short essay on the economic theory of incomplete contracts and to illuminate its current and potential impact on the legal analysis of contracts and contract law. Economic contract theory has made significant inroads in legal scholarship over the past fifteen years, and this is a good time to take stock of its strengths and weaknesses. Several recent publications in the Yale Law Journal have offered evaluations of the contributions of contract theory.' In this essay, we offer our opinion as to its future path in legal scholarship. In particular, we …
Financial Contracts And The New Bankruptcy Code: Insulating Markets From Bankrupt Debtors And Bankruptcy Judges, Edward R. Morrison, Joerg Riegel
Financial Contracts And The New Bankruptcy Code: Insulating Markets From Bankrupt Debtors And Bankruptcy Judges, Edward R. Morrison, Joerg Riegel
Faculty Scholarship
The reforms of 2005 yield important but subtle changes in the Bankruptcy Code's treatment of financial contracts. They might appear only to eliminate longstanding uncertainty surrounding the protections available to financial contract counterparties, especially counterparties to repurchase transactions and other derivative contracts. But the ambit of the reforms is much broader. The expanded definitions – especially the definition of "swap agreement" – are now so broad that nearly every derivative contract is subject to the Code's protection. Instead of protecting particular counterparties to particular transactions, the Code now protects any counterparty to any derivative contract. Entire markets have been insulated …
Risk Management In Long-Term Contracts, Victor P. Goldberg
Risk Management In Long-Term Contracts, Victor P. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
Long-term contracts are designed to manage risk. After a brief discussion of why it is unhelpful to invoke risk aversion for analyzing serious commercial transactions between sophisticated entities, this paper focuses on adaptation to changed circumstances. In particular, it considers the options to abandon and the discretion to change quantity. It then analyzes a poorly designed contract between Alcoa and Essex showing how the parties misframed their problem and designed a long-term contract that was doomed to fail.
Reading Wood V. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon With Help From The Kewpie Dolls, Victor P. Goldberg
Reading Wood V. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon With Help From The Kewpie Dolls, Victor P. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
In Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, Cardozo found consideration in an apparently illusory contract by implying a reasonable effort obligation. Unbeknownst to Cardozo, Wood had agreed to represent Rose O'Neill, the inventory of the kewpie doll in an earlier exclusive contract. Wood sued O'Neill two months prior to entering into the Lucy arrangement. That contract included an explicit best efforts clause. The failure to include such a clause in this contract was, quite likely, deliberate, suggesting that Wood was trying to avoid making a binding commitment to Lucy. The paper examines both the kewpie doll and Lucy contract in some …
Anticipating Litigation In Contract Design, Robert E. Scott, George G. Triantis
Anticipating Litigation In Contract Design, Robert E. Scott, George G. Triantis
Faculty Scholarship
Contract theory does not address the question of how parties design contracts under the existing adversarial system, which relies on the parties to establish relevant facts indirectly by the use of evidentiary proxies. In this Article, we advance a theory of contract design in a world of costly litigation. We examine the efficiency of investment at the front end and back end of the contracting process, where we focus on litigation as the back-end stage. In deciding whether to express their obligations in precise or vague terms, contracting parties implicitly allocate costs between the front and back end. When the …
Featuring The Three Tenors In La Triviata, Victor P. Goldberg
Featuring The Three Tenors In La Triviata, Victor P. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
In the “Three Tenors” case the FTC found an agreement to be an antitrust violation despite the fact that there was no way it could be anticompetitive. The Commission failed to heed the lessons of Coase’s classic paper on the nature of the firm, making a sharp distinction between activities within a firm (legal) and across firm boundaries (not legal). Analytically, there should be no distinction. The decision to integrate activities by contract rather than ownership is a matter of relative transactions costs. Since the boundaries of the firm are, ultimately, an economic decision reflecting the costs and benefits of …
A Pluralist Approach To Interpretation: Wills And Contracts, Kent Greenawalt
A Pluralist Approach To Interpretation: Wills And Contracts, Kent Greenawalt
Faculty Scholarship
This account of legal interpretation focuses mainly on wills and contracts. It adopts a pluralist approach, one that treats a number of factors as potentially relevant and does not assume that all relevant factors necessarily reduce to one overarching inquiry that is the same whatever legal text is being interpreted.