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Law and Economics

2009

Contracts

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Moral Judgment And Moral Heuristics In Breach Of Contract, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan Jan 2009

Moral Judgment And Moral Heuristics In Breach Of Contract, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

All Faculty Scholarship

Most people think that breaking a promise is immoral, and that a breach of contract is a kind of broken promise. However, the law does not explicitly recognize the moral context of breach of contract. Using a series of web-based questionnaires, we asked subjects to read breach of contract cases and answer questions about the legal, financial, and moral implications of each case. Our results suggest that people are quite sensitive to the moral dimensions of a breach of contract, especially the perceived intentions of the breacher. In the first study, we framed the motivation for a contractor's breach as …

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The Attributes Of Transactions And The Limits Of The New Formalism, Adam B. Badawi Dec 2008

The Attributes Of Transactions And The Limits Of The New Formalism, Adam B. Badawi

Adam B. Badawi

A recent movement in contracts scholarship—the so-called New Formalism—seeks to justify limitations on the introduction of extrinsic evidence to interpret contracts on the instrumental grounds of efficiency and empirical observation. Less attention has been directed at the development of a similar instrumental argument for the more contextual types of interpretation observed in the Uniform Commercial Code and the Restatement (Second) of Contracts. This Article engages this question by arguing that the relative ability of transactors to draft complete contracts is likely to be an important determinant of their preferred interpretive regime. Where low contracting costs allow commercial parties to draft …

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