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Full-Text Articles in Law
After The Golden Victory: Still Lost At Sea, Victor P. Goldberg
After The Golden Victory: Still Lost At Sea, Victor P. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
In The Golden Victory the House of Lords held that when determining damages for a repudiatory breach, in a conflict between the compensatory principle and finality, the former trumped. The decision was recently ratified by the Supreme Court in Bunge SA v. Nidera BV. The claim in this paper is that this was a mistake; properly conceived, there is no conflict. The contract should be viewed as an asset and compensation would entail determining the decline in value of that asset at the time of the breach. The value of the contract at that moment would reflect the possible effects …
From British Westinghouse To The New Flamenco: Misunderstanding Mitigation, Victor P. Goldberg
From British Westinghouse To The New Flamenco: Misunderstanding Mitigation, Victor P. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
Both the venerable British Westinghouse decision and the current New Flamenco case have been analyzed in terms of mitigation. Properly understood, in neither is mitigation relevant. Although in the former, the House of Lords came to the right result, the replacement of the substandard turbines with new superior ones was not to mitigate damages — the buyer would have installed the new turbines even had the Westinghouse turbines met the contractual specifications. Even if Westinghouse’s failure accelerated the replacement (which it almost certainly did not) it would have been a mistake to compensate the buyer for the cost of the …
Variation In Boilerplate: Rational Design Or Random Mutation?, Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Variation In Boilerplate: Rational Design Or Random Mutation?, Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
Standard contract doctrine presumes that sophisticated parties choose their terminology carefully because they want courts or counterparts to understand what they intended. The implication of this “Rational Design” model of rational behavior is that courts should pay careful attention to the precise phrasing of contracts. Using a study of the sovereign bond market, we examine the Rational Design model as applied to standard-form contracting. In NML v. Argentina, federal courts in New York attached importance to the precise phrasing of the boilerplate contracts at issue. The industry promptly condemned the decision for a supposedly erroneous interpretation of a variant of …
Opinion Of Justice Katherine Franke In Obergefell V. Hodges, Katherine M. Franke
Opinion Of Justice Katherine Franke In Obergefell V. Hodges, Katherine M. Franke
Faculty Scholarship
Professor Jack Balkin has assembled a group of 9 scholars and advocates to write opinions in the Obergefell v. Hodges case for a forthcoming volume, What Obergefell Should Have Said (Yale University Press 2017). Balkin writes for the majority of the Court and I provide a concurrence along with a short commentary explaining my approach and reasoning. In summary, I conclude that: Laws barring same-sex couples from eligibility for licensure as civil marriages violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because they find their origin in and perpetuate notions of heterosexual supremacy, and have the aim and effect …