Law Commons^™

Formalism In Contract Exposition, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Formalism in contract law has had many defenders and many critics. What lawmakers need, however, is an account of when formalist approaches work and when they do not. This article addresses that need by providing general theory of the rules of contract interpretation and construction and identifying several ways those rules can be more or less formalist. The theory draws from legal philosophy, the philosophy of language, economic contracts scholarship, and caselaw.

The result is a distinction between two forms of formalism in contract law. Formalities effect legal change by virtue of their form alone, thereby obviating interpretation. Examples from …

Convergence By Design: Who Contracts And The Plural Purposes Of Contract Law, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A theory is robustly pluralist if it maintains that law is justified by multiple independent nonordered principles. Some have argued that robustly pluralist theories are deficient because they can provide no practical guidance when those principles conflict. The objection is misplaced when applied to pluralist theories of contract law.

This article demonstrates the possibility of a robustly pluralist and practically relevant theory of contract law by modeling a multipurpose law of contract. Five simple models are constructed to illustrate several purposes a contract law might serve, depending on preferences of the populace (self-interested utility maximizers, a preference for sharing, a …

Law School News: Appeals Court Hears Labor Arguments At Roger Williams University School Of Law 10-2-2018, Katie Mulvaney, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Contract, Promise, And The Right Of Redress, Andrew S. Gold

William & Mary Business Law Review

This Essay reviews Nathan Oman’s recent book, The Dignity of Commerce. The book is compelling, and it makes an important and original contribution to contract theory—a contribution that insightfully shows how markets matter. Yet, in the course of developing a market-centered justification for contract law, The Dignity of Commerce also downplays the significance of consent and promissory morality. In both cases, the book’s argument is problematic, but this Essay will address questions of promissory morality. Oman contends that promise-based accounts struggle with contract law’s bilateralism and with its private standing doctrine. Yet, promissory morality is a very good fit …

Kill The Monster: Promissory Estoppel As An Independent Cause Of Action, Susan Lorde Martin

William & Mary Business Law Review

Contract rules may be dissolving into tort-type notions of unfairness and injustice. Traditionally, promissory estoppel was viewed as a substitute for consideration in situations where promisors made promises knowing that promisees would act in reliance on them, the promisees did act on the promises, and the promisors refused to do what they promised to do, to the promisees’ detriment. The purpose of promissory estoppel was clearly one of fairness and preventing injustice by enforcing a promise not supported by consideration in very limited circumstances. In recent cases, however, courts have been approving the use of promissory estoppel as an independent …

Waive Goodbye To Appellate Review Of Plea Bargaining: Specific Performance Of Appellate Waiver Provisions Should Be Limited To Extraordinary Circumstances, Holly P. Pratesi

Brooklyn Law Review

In the federal criminal justice system, plea bargaining remains the predominant method for disposing of cases. An important provision in most plea agreements consists of the waiver of the defendant’s right to appeal the conviction or sentence. This note explores the constitutional, contractual, and policy implications of a recent Third Circuit decision that would allow specific performance as a remedy where a defendant’s only breach of the plea agreement consists of filing an appeal arguably precluded by an appellate waiver provision. This note argues that the approach taken by the Third Circuit in United States v. Erwin could effectively preclude …

Promises, Trust, And Contract Law, Anthony J. Bellia

Anthony J. Bellia

The need for individuals to be able to trust that promises will be performed is central to justifying a law that renders certain promises enforceable. This Article argues that the legal enforcement of certain promises to meet this need does not necessarily diminish the personal relationships of trust in which such promises are made, as has been argued. Rather, this Article argues, the making and performance of legally enforceable promises can assist individuals in building relationships of trust, as it assists them in the pursuit of myriad goods.

According To An Unnamed Official: Reconsidering The Consequences Of Confidential Source Agreements When Promises Are Broken By The Press, Peri Z. Hansen

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Hunting Promissory Estoppel, David Snyder

David Snyder

This paper considers how promissory estoppel jobs are undertaken in two jurisdictions that ought not to need promissory estoppel. The purpose is to achieve a better understanding of systematic decisions to enforce promises and to discover the doctrinal combinations possible in mixed Civil Law/Common Law jurisdictions. This bilateral comparison allows an examination of the different philosophical and moral bases for according promises legal force, whether founded on contract and will or on delict and injury. The differing functions of formalities are also discussed. More particularly, Scotland does not have promissory estoppel but has a remarkable doctrine allowing the enforceability even …

Promise Etc., Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article examines the moral obligations contractual agreements generate. It distinguishes a narrow sense of "promise," central to autonomy theories, according to which to promise is to communicate an intention to undertake an obligation by the very communication of that intention. Not every agreement involves promises in this sense. Yet nonpromissory agreements too commonly generate moral obligations. And even when a party promises to perform, her promise need not be the only reason for her moral obligation to do so. Other possible reasons include reliance, an invitation to trust, implicit or explicit, principles of reciprocity, and the harm that nonperformance …

To Perform Or Pay Damages, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In The Myth of Efficient Breach: New Defenses of the Expectation Interest, Daniel Markovits and Alan Schwartz argue that contractual promises between sophisticated parties are best interpreted as disjunctive promises to perform or pay damages. They further argue that this dual performance hypothesis answers moral critics of the expectation remedy. This comment makes three claims about Markovits and Schwartz's argument. First, although the dual performance hypothesis is supported by Markovits and Schwartz's instrumentalist model, they do not have a good argument that it is empirically correct -- that it is the best interpretation of what sophisticated parties actually intend. …

Freedom From Reliance: A Contract Approach To Express Warranty, Sidney Kwestel

Sidney Kwestel

No abstract provided.

Thoughts On The Divergence Of Contract And Promise, Ian C. Bartrum

Ian C Bartrum

This essay offers some brief thoughts on Seana Shiffrin's recent work regarding the divergence of contractual and promissory norms. I conclude that Shiffrin does not do enough to separate and account for the different consequentalist and deontological justifications underlying each institution, and does not do enough to explain how promises give rise to the "moral" duties she posits. I suggest, instead, that the divergence between contract and promise is justified by the different roles each institution plays in our lives, and that, in fact, keeping strictly promissory duties outside the scope of state coercion actually facilitates a strong culture of …

Unequal Promises, Aditi Bagchi

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores the nature and implications of a type of inequality that is widespread but largely ignored. Promises deliver important ethical value, and commercial promises, because they are our most common experience of promise with strangers, are of special value. But not all commercial promises generate that value equally. This paper makes the following claims: (1) while some retail promises are promises either to deliver a good or service, or to pay some compensation, other retail promises are simple promises to deliver a good or service; (2) retail promises in high-end markets are more likely to have the simple …

Contract Is Not Promise; Contract Is Consent, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the 1980s, Charles Fried was right to focus on what was missing from both the “death of contract” and “law and economics” approaches to contract law: the internal morality of contract. But he focused on the wrong morality. Rather than embodying the morality of promise-keeping, the enforcement of contracts can best be explained and justified as a product of the parties’ consent to be legally bound. In this essay, I observe that, in Contract as Promise, Fried himself admits that the “promise principle” cannot explain or justify two features that are at the core of contract law: the objective …

Thoughts On The Divergence Of Promise And Contract, Ian C. Bartrum

Scholarly Works

This essay offers some brief thoughts on Seana Shiffrin‘s recent work regarding the divergence of contractual and promissory norms. The author conclude that Shiffrin does not do enough to separate and account for the different consequentalist and deontological justifications underlying each institution, and does not do enough to explain how promises give rise to the “moral” duties she posits. The author suggest, instead, that the divergence between contract and promise is justified by the different roles each institution plays in our lives, and that, in fact, keeping strictly promissory duties outside the scope of state coercion actually facilitates a strong …

Hunting Promissory Estoppel, David V. Snyder

Contributions to Books

This paper considers how promissory estoppel jobs are undertaken in two jurisdictions that ought not to need promissory estoppel. The purpose is to achieve a better understanding of systematic decisions to enforce promises and to discover the doctrinal combinations possible in mixed Civil Law/Common Law jurisdictions. This bilateral comparison allows an examination of the different philosophical and moral bases for according promises legal force, whether founded on contract and will or on delict and injury. The differing functions of formalities are also discussed. More particularly, Scotland does not have promissory estoppel but has a remarkable doctrine allowing the enforceability even …

The Correspondence Of Contract And Promise, Jody S. Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

Correspondence accounts of the relationship between contract and promise hold either that contract law is justified to the extent it enforces a corresponding moral responsibility for a promise or unjustified to the extent it undermines promissory morality by refusing to enforce a corresponding moral responsibility for a promise. In this Article, I claim that contract scholars have mistakenly presumed that they can assess the correspondence between contract and promise without first providing a theory of self-imposed moral responsibility that explains and justifies the promise principle. I argue that any plausible theory of self-imposed moral responsibility is inconsistent with a strong …

Three Pictures Of Contract: Duty, Power And Compound Rule, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A fundamental divide among theories of contract law is between those that picture contract as a power and those that picture it as a duty. On the power-conferring picture, contracting is a sort of legislative act, in which persons determine what law will apply to their transaction. On the duty-imposing picture, contract law puts duties on persons entering into agreements for consideration whether they want them or not. Until now, very little attention has been paid to the problem of how to tell whether a given rule is power conferring or duty imposing -- a question that should lie at …

Duty And Consequence: A Non-Conflating Theory Of Promise And Contract, Jeffrey Marc Lipshaw

ExpressO

I argue that the debate between deontologists and consequentialists of contract law conflates and therefore unduly confuses the analysis of each of them. The debate is a reprise of the conflation of reason and knowledge. Present-day legal consequentialists see reason (pure or practical) as unhelpful or worse. Pragmatism, if anything, rules the day. But the present-day rationalists fare no better, seeking to make constitutive claims of knowledge on the basis of reason. Hence the concept of contract as promise has been subject to the criticism that it fails as an explanation of the law (versus an exposition of how our …

Promises, Trust, And Contract Law, Anthony J. Bellia

Journal Articles

The need for individuals to be able to trust that promises will be performed is central to justifying a law that renders certain promises enforceable. This Article argues that the legal enforcement of certain promises to meet this need does not necessarily diminish the personal relationships of trust in which such promises are made, as has been argued. Rather, this Article argues, the making and performance of legally enforceable promises can assist individuals in building relationships of trust, as it assists them in the pursuit of myriad goods.

Promises And Paternalism, E. Allan Farnsworth

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Consideration And Estoppel: Problem And Panacea, Bruce Macdougall

Dalhousie Law Journal

In his book, The History of the Common Law of Contract, A.W.B. Simpson demonstrates that consideration originally seems to have meant the "matter of inducement" - the "why" of entering a promise.' He writes: "The essence of the doctrine of consideration, then, is the adoption by the common law of the idea that the legal effect of a promise should depend upon the factor or factors which motivated the promise. To decide whether a promise to do X is binding, you need to know why the promise was made."2 In modem terms, according to Simpson, a promise which lacks any …

Freedom From Reliance: A Contract Approach To Express Warranty, Sidney Kwestel

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Contract Law, Default Rules, And The Philosophy Of Promising, Richard Craswell

Michigan Law Review

Among the topics addressed by moral philosophy is the obligation to keep one's promises. To many philosophers, there is something strange (or, at least, something calling for explanatie1n) in the idea that moral obligations can be created simply by an individual's saying so yet this is what seems to happen when a person makes a promise. Consequently, there is by now a large body of literature attempting to identify the exact source and nature of this moral obligation.

Part I of this article presents a more detailed survey of recent philosophical writings about promises, for the benefit of legal readers …

A Critique Of The Promise Model Of Contract, Wallace K. Lightsey

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Conditions Of Personal Satisfaction In The Law Of Contracts, James Brook

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Misleading Advertising: Prevent Or Punish?, Patrick Fitzgerald

Dalhousie Law Journal

I "Promise, great promise," said Dr. Johnson, "is the soul of advertisement." But what if the promise isn't kept? What sort of crime is that? No crime at all, at common law. The common law allotted promises and their breach not to the criminal law but to the law of contract. More important still, the law saw the problem of advertising as part of a wider problem to be solved not by law but by a different institution - the market. The problem of advertising, after all, is one special facet of the conflict between seller and buyer.' According to …

Contracts-Doctrine Of "Commercial Frustration" As Applied To Leases Of Real Property, Margaret Groefsema S. Ed.

Michigan Law Review

A mushroom crop of litigation has sprung up as a result of wartime governmental restrictions on production and consumption of civilian goods, particularly with respect to regulations of the sale of gasoline, tires, automobiles, and automobile accessories. Numerous problems have confronted the courts involving leases of property for the purpose of selling or servicing motor vehicles, where the lessee has sought to be released from his covenant to pay rent by invoking the so-called doctrine of "commercial frustration."

Note And Comment, Edgar N. Durfee, Cyril E. Bailey, Edwin B. Stason, William C. O'Keefe, Clyde Y. Morris

Michigan Law Review

The Basis of Relief from Penalties and Forfeitures - The equitable principle of relief from penalties and forfeitures is so far elementary as almost to defy analysis. Many, perhaps most, of the judicial explanations of the principle have based it upon interpretation or construction, appealing to the doctrine that equity regards intent rather than form. Yet a logical application of this doctrine would lead to results very different from those which have actually been arrived at in the decisions. Thus, a stipulation in a mortgage that the mortgagor waives his equity of redemption can hardly be interpreted as meaning that …