Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Series

Contracts

Contracts

2004

University of Michigan Law School

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

An Ex-Ante View Of The Battle Of The Forms: Inducing Parties To Draft Reasonable Terms, Omri Ben-Shahar Oct 2004

An Ex-Ante View Of The Battle Of The Forms: Inducing Parties To Draft Reasonable Terms, Omri Ben-Shahar

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

This paper focuses on one type of ex-ante effect of the battle of the forms: the incentive to draft reasonable boilerplate terms. It argues that the experience with the battle-of-the-forms rule under the CISG reinforces what we already know, that existing legal solutions do not provide any incentive for the parties to draft reasonable forms. The paper suggests that the goal of inducing parties to draft reasonable terms can be significantly promoted by a third rule, a variant of the “best-shot” rule proposed by Victor Goldberg. Under the version labeled the “reasonable-shot” rule, the court would resolve the battle of …


Credible Coercion, Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar Mar 2004

Credible Coercion, Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

The ideal of individual liberty and autonomy requires that society provide relief against coercion. In the law, this requirement is often translated into rules that operate “post-coercion” to undo the legal consequences of acts and promises extracted under duress. This Article argues that these ex-post anti-duress measures, rather than helping the coerced party, might in fact hurt her. When coercion is credible—when a credible threat to inflict an even worse outcome underlies the surrender of the coerced party—ex post relief will only induce the strong party to execute the threatened outcome, to the detriment of the coerced party. Anti-duress relief …


"Agreeing To Disagree": Filling Gaps In Deliberately Incomplete Contracts, Omri Ben-Shahar Jan 2004

"Agreeing To Disagree": Filling Gaps In Deliberately Incomplete Contracts, Omri Ben-Shahar

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

This Article develops a new standard for gap filling in incomplete contracts. It focuses on an important class of situations in which parties leave their agreement deliberately incomplete, with the intent to further negotiate and resolve the remaining issues. In these situations, neither the traditional no-enforcement result nor the usual gap filling approaches accord with the parties’ partial consent. Instead, the Article develops the concept of pro-defendant gap-fillers, under which each party is granted an option to enforce the transaction supplemented with terms most favorable (within reason) to the other party. A deliberately incomplete contract with pro-defendant gap fillers transforms …