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Full-Text Articles in Law

Of Power And Responsibility: The Political Morality Of Federal Systems, Daniel Halberstam Jan 2004

Of Power And Responsibility: The Political Morality Of Federal Systems, Daniel Halberstam

Articles

In comparative constitutional discourse, Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus; we eagerly tell our European counterparts about the U.S. constitutional experience, but rarely do we listen when they talk to us about their own. Whereas Europeans routinely examine U.S. constitutionalism as an illuminating point of comparison or contrast, as Americans, we seem convinced that we have nothing to learn from looking abroad. This Article challenges that assumption. In particular, it argues that American courts and scholars have overlooked an important alternative to the dominant interpretation of the division of powers in the United States by ignoring the theory …


The Law Of Duress And The Economics Of Credible Threats, Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar Jan 2004

The Law Of Duress And The Economics Of Credible Threats, Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar

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This paper argues that enforcement of an agreement, reached under a threat to refrain from dealing, should be conditioned solely on the threat's credibility. When a credible threat exists, enforcement promotes social welfare and the threatened party's interests. If agreements backed by credible threats were not enforceable, the threatening party would not extort them and would instead refrain from deaing-to the threatened party's detriment. The doctrine of duress, which invalidates such agreements, hurts the coerced party. By denying enforcement when a credible threat exists, the duress doctrine precludes the threatened party from making the commitment necessary to reach agreement. Paradoxically, …


Mutual Assent Versus Gradual Ascent: The Debate Over The Right To Retract, Omri Ben-Shahar Jan 2004

Mutual Assent Versus Gradual Ascent: The Debate Over The Right To Retract, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

I ended Contracts Without Consent: Exploring a New Basis for Contract Liability with a reminder that the analysis was "lacking in rigor and in nuance" and that "[i]t remains for future work to explore the extent to which the approach developed. . . has the horsepower to resolve pragmatically the problems that have proven difficult for current doctrine and to examine whether these solutions advance the various social objectives associated with contract formation." Such "future work" arrived sooner than I expected. I have now had the privilege to read the three commentaries that the University of Pennsylvania Law Review solicited, …


Contracts Without Consent: Exploring A New Basis For Contractual Liability, Omri Ben-Shahar Jan 2004

Contracts Without Consent: Exploring A New Basis For Contractual Liability, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

This Essay explores an alternative to one of the pillars of contract law, that obligations arise only when there is "mutual assent "--when the parties reach consensus over the terms of the transaction. It explores a principle of "no-retraction," under which each party is obligated to terms it manifested and can retract only with some liability. In contrast to the all-or-nothing nature of the mutual assent regime, where preliminary forms of consent are either full-blown contracts or create no obligation, under the no-retraction regime, obligations emerge gradually, as the positions of the negotiating parties draw closer. Further, the no-retraction liability …