Law Commons^™

Actual Versus Perceived Performance Of Judges, Theodore Eisenberg, Talia Fisher, Issi Rosen-Zvi

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Cognitive Theory Of Fiduciary Relationships, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Is there anything special or distinctive about fiduciary relationships? Or is the term "fiduciary" nothing more than a label that obscures rather than clarifies? Recently, several law-and-economics scholars, building on the economic literature on agency costs, have argued that nothing categorically distinguishes fiduciary from nonfiduciary legal relationships. So-called fiduciary relationships, they argue, are nothing more or less than contractual relationships.

This Essay hypothesizes that courts possess a fairly well-developed schema of the fiduciary role, but have not developed a comparable schema for ordinary contracting parties. The fiduciary role-schema often makes courts more likely to over-interpret behavior of fiduciaries than in …