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Full-Text Articles in Law
Specific Performance: On Freedom And Commitment In Contract Law, Hanoch Dagan, Michael A. Heller
Specific Performance: On Freedom And Commitment In Contract Law, Hanoch Dagan, Michael A. Heller
Faculty Scholarship
When should specific performance be available for breach of contract? This question — at the core of contract — divides common-law and civil-law jurisdictions and it has bedeviled generations of comparativists, along with legal economists, historians, and philosophers. Yet none of these disciplines has provided a persuasive answer. This Article provides a normatively attractive and conceptually coherent account, one grounded in respect for the autonomy of the promisor’s future self. Properly understood, autonomy explains why expectation damages should be the ordinary remedy for contract breach. This same normative commitment justifies the “uniqueness exception,” where specific performance is typically awarded, and …
A Nihilistic View Of The Efficient Breach, Jeffrey L. Harrison
A Nihilistic View Of The Efficient Breach, Jeffrey L. Harrison
UF Law Faculty Publications
This article began as a reaction to an article by Daniel Makovits and Alan Schwartz in the Virginia Law Review, “The Myth of the Efficient Breach. . . .” In their article they offer what they call “new defenses” of the expectation interest as a contract remedy. Much of their analysis has been anticipated by others. Plus, in my view the law and economics concepts they seem to rely on lost their legitimacy years ago. Their article was the catalyst for this broader examination of forty years of writing about the efficient breach and an assessment of where it has …
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 …