Law Commons^™

Contracts Scholarship Beyond Materialisierung, Daniela Caruso

Faculty Scholarship

This comment aims to show how Klaus Eller's paper on ‘The Political Economy of Tenancy Contract Law’¹ raises the stakes of private law scholarship and contributes to the larger project of remodeling legal institutions in a progressive direction. The comment starts by contextualising the rapid spread of the Law and Political Economy (LPE) movement; illustrates through examples the generative impact of LPE on contemporary contracts scholarship; and highlights two strands of Eller’s original contribution to such literature: a welcome reflection on the value and limits of Materialisierung, and a radical widening of the private law inquiry to include …

Waivers, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

Waiver contracts are agreements in which one party promises not to sue the other for injuries that occur during their contractual relationship. Waivers are controversial in the consumer context, especially when presented in standard form, take-it-or-leave-it contracts. The law on waivers appears muddled, with no consistent doctrine or policy among the courts on enforceability. The aim of this paper is to offer a consistent set of policies that can form the foundation of a consistent set of doctrines, leading ultimately to a more apparently consistent treatment of waivers in the courts. The most basic piece of this paper’s framework is …

Langdell And The Foundation Of Classical Contract Law, Daniel P. O'Gorman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Consumer Law As An Axis Of Economic Inequality, Daniel Markovits, Barak D. Richman, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

In the standard paradigm of consumer law, a voluntary transaction is supposed to be welfare enhancing for each of the parties involved. We challenge this foundational presumption and ask to what extent many common consumer contracts are in fact extractive despite resulting from voluntary exchanges. With inequality growing throughout the world, to a degree that threatens the stability of both the economies and governments of even the wealthiest nations, we ask this fundamental question in an effort to identify root causes of inequality and to mark some guideposts for the articles that follow. Taken together, our speculations suggest that the …

If You Draw It, Students Learn It: An Approach To Teaching Contracts And Other Doctrinal Courses, Paul Figueroa

Faculty Scholarship

Spring 2019 was my first semester as a tenure-stream law professor. That semester I taught Legal Remedies and Contracts II—two subjects that overlap in their coverage of contract damages. I felt very comfortable teaching contracts, given my nearly twenty years of experience on contractual matters in both the private and public sectors. My first few classes went well, which validated my initial confidence. However, my optimism about the semester evaporated when I attempted to teach the parol evidence rule (“PER”).1 It was a Monday, and before starting my Contracts II class I asked the students, “How was the weekend?” followed …

Contract's Covert Meddlers, Sarah Winsberg

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lowering The Stakes Of The Employment Contract, Aditi Bagchi

Faculty Scholarship

Every country has to make hard choices about the distribution of entitlements. But employers control the entitlements that individual Americans enjoy to a far greater extent than those in other rich democracies. In this Essay, I argue that, in the absence of the political consensus necessary to deliver state solutions to political questions, employers here are assigned an exaggerated role in employees’ lives. Government incentives for and directives to employers have become a strategy of political deflection. The effect has been to raise the stakes of employment well beyond the scope of those terms and conditions that relate to attracting …

Why The Corporation Locks In Financial Capital But The Partnership Does Not, Richard Squire

Faculty Scholarship

Each partner in an at-will partnership can obtain a cash payout of his interest at any time. The corporation, by contrast, locks in shareholder capital, denying general payout rights to shareholders unless the charter states otherwise. What explains this difference? This Article argues that partner payout rights reduce the costs of two other characteristics of the partnership: the non-transferability of partner control rights, and the possibility for partnerships to be formed inadvertently. While these characteristics serve valuable functions, they can introduce a bilateral-monopoly problem and a special freezeout hazard unless each partner can force the firm to cash out his …

Twitter V. Musk: The "Trial Of The Century" That Wasn't, Ann M. Lipton, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

The months-long saga over Elon Musk's on-again, off-again acquisition of Twitter provided considerable entertainment for lawyers and laypeople alike. But for those of us who teach business law, it also provided a unique (and in certain ways, vexing) opportunity to show real-time examples of the legal principles that are the grist for courses in contracts, corporations, corporate finance, and mergers and acquisitions.

Both of us found ourselves incorporating the saga into our classroom discussions, which in turn informed our own thinking about how the dynamic played out. Although we were both relatively active on social media (indeed on Twitter itself) …

Contractual Evolution, Matthew Jennejohn, Julian Nyarko, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Conventional wisdom portrays contracts as static distillations of parties’ shared intent at some discrete point in time. In reality, however, contract terms evolve in response to their environments, including new laws, legal interpretations, and economic shocks. While several legal scholars have offered stylized accounts of this evolutionary process, we still lack a coherent, general theory that broadly captures the dynamics of real-world contracting practice. This paper advances such a theory, in which the evolution of contract terms is a byproduct of several key features, including efficiency concerns, information, and sequential learning by attorneys who negotiate several deals over time. Each …