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Full-Text Articles in Law
Sovereign Debt As A Commodity: A Contract Law Perspective, Dania Thomas
Sovereign Debt As A Commodity: A Contract Law Perspective, Dania Thomas
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
The ad hoc institutional configurations that facilitated the resolution of sovereign insolvency for over thirty years are fragmenting. Recent court decisions interpreting the pari passu clause in sovereign debt contracts reveal the dangers of pressuring common law courts to enforce contracts and mediate structural flaws in the market. The courts have dismantled sovereign protections in international law and common law checks and balances. They have gone beyond precedent to innovate remedies justified by interpreting a clause whose meaning and function were not clearly understood by the contracting parties themselves. They have also opened up a possible inter-creditor obligation that circumvents …
Disclaimers Of Contractual Liability And Voluntary Obligations, Michael G. Pratt
Disclaimers Of Contractual Liability And Voluntary Obligations, Michael G. Pratt
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
Contractual obligations are traditionally regarded as voluntary. A voluntary obligation is one that can be acquired only if one intends to acquire it. This traditional understanding finds doctrinal expression in the requirement that contracting parties intend to create legal relations. It has, however, been doubted that the Anglo-Canadian law of contract insists on this requirement. Skeptics argue that cases ostensibly decided on the basis of such a requirement are better explained otherwise. In this paper I invoke the legal force of contractual disclaimers to show that contractual obligations are indeed voluntary. When parties to an agreement purport to exclude it …
Mistake In Assumptions, Stephen Waddams
Mistake In Assumptions, Stephen Waddams
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
Mistake raises several important and difficult questions for contract law. The question addressed here is, when is it an excuse from contractual obligation that a contract has been made under the influence of a mistake of fact? Posed in this form, the question invites attention to aspects of contract law not usually considered in relation to each other, particularly misrepresentation, frustration, and more generally, unjust enrichment, all areas in which Professor McCamus has written extensively. This article brings these areas together with the object of throwing useful light on each of them, both from the point of view of understanding …
Consideration Which Happens To Fail, Andrew Kull
Consideration Which Happens To Fail, Andrew Kull
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
Recent English commentary employs the timeworn expression “failure of consideration” in an unprecedented way. It can now designate an expansive residual category of grounds for restitution: at its fullest, “the failure to sustain itself of the state of affairs contemplated as a basis” for a transaction by which one party is enriched at the expense of another. Because the result is plainly to incorporate a civilian-style “absence of basis” test within commonlaw unjust enrichment, the new “failure of consideration” carries an incidental implication for Canadian restitution law: if Garland v Consumers’ Gas really announced a shift from commonlaw “unjust factors” …
The Complex Context Of Contract Law, Alberto Salazar Valle
The Complex Context Of Contract Law, Alberto Salazar Valle
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
No abstract provided.
The Promise Of Certainty In The Law Of Pre-Incorporation Contracts, Poonam Puri
The Promise Of Certainty In The Law Of Pre-Incorporation Contracts, Poonam Puri
Articles & Book Chapters
In practice, most pre-incorporation contracts cause no difficulty for the parties who intend to benefit directly from them. In the normal course of events, once the corporation is incorporated, both the corporation and the third party perform on the contract: However, when the corporation does not come into existence, or comes into existence but refuses to adopt a contract, difficult legal issues arise in relation to the rights and liabilities of the parties? In these situations, the following questions must be -resolved: To what extent is the promoter liable on,the contract? To what extent is the corporation liable on the …
Tort In A Contractual Matrix, John G. Fleming
Tort In A Contractual Matrix, John G. Fleming
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
This article addresses one aspect of the interface between tort and contract: the way tort law is affected, whether by extending or contracting its reach, by the parties coming together against a contractual structure. Two basic situations are considered. The first concerns the effect of a contractual limitation clause on the tort liability of, or to, a third party such as a subcontractor's to the building owner. The second considers what effect to attribute to a plaintiff's failure to protect himself or herself in advance by contracting against the risk
Is The Pearson Airport Legislation Unconstitutional?: The Rule Of Law As A Limit On Contract Repudiation By Government, Patrick J. Monahan
Is The Pearson Airport Legislation Unconstitutional?: The Rule Of Law As A Limit On Contract Repudiation By Government, Patrick J. Monahan
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
It has long been assumed that Parliament has unlimited power to enact legislation cancelling valid contracts and denying compensation to any persons affected. This paper challenges that conventional wisdom. The author argues that the principle of the rule of law requires that governments be accountable in the ordinary courts for wrongful actions of government officials. This principle is undermined if government is absolved from any liability for breach of a fairly bargained and valid contract. Thus, legislation purporting to abrogate contracts and deny compensation is invalid, since it violates the implied limits on legislative authority associated with the rule of …
Remedies When Contracts Lack Consent: Autonomy And Institutional Competence, Richard Craswell
Remedies When Contracts Lack Consent: Autonomy And Institutional Competence, Richard Craswell
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
Autonomy-based theories hold that enforceable contracts require the knowing and voluntary consent of the parties. In defining "knowing" and "voluntary," however, autonomy theorists have paid little attention to the remedy that will be granted if consent is round to be lacking, or to the question of what obligations (if any) will be enforced in place of the unconsented-to contract. In this paper, I expand on Michael Trebilcock's argument that considerations of institutional competence-specifically, the relative ability of courts and private actors to craft acceptable substitute obligations-should sometimes play a key role in defining what counts as "knowing" and "voluntary" consent.
The Idea Of A Public Basis Of Justification For Contract, Peter Benson
The Idea Of A Public Basis Of Justification For Contract, Peter Benson
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
The essay has two main objects. The first is to take up and to develop certain of the difficulties that Professor Trebilcock finds with autonomy and welfare-based theories of contract law. The essay reaches the conclusion that efficiency, autonomy, and welfare approaches suffer from fundamental and yet qualitatively different kinds of defects. Moreover, in the course of its critical examination of these theories, the essay introduces and makes explicit an ideal of justification which The Limits of Freedom of Contract only implicitly assumes-an ideal of justification which the essay, following the recent work of Rawls, calls a "public basis of …