Law Commons^™

Arthur Linton Corbin, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This chapter on Arthur Linton Corbin will appear in the forthcoming collection, Scholars of Contract Law. The chapter provides a brief summary of Corbin’s life, then discusses five topics: Corbin’s Socratic approach to the classroom and his introduction of the caselaw method at Yale; Corbin’s analytic approach, which was inspired by Hohfeld and is illustrated by Corbin’s definitions of “contract” and “consideration”; Corbin’s evolutionary theory of the common law, his understanding of the relationship between law and social mores, and his insistence that legal rules always be treated as mere “working rules”; Corbin’s occasional appeal, despite his general aversion …

Promise, Agreement, Contract, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is natural to wonder about contract law’s relationship to the morality of promises and agreements. This Chapter distinguishes two ways to conceive of that relationship. First, parties’ agreement-based moral obligations might figure into the explanation of contract law—into an account of its functions or justifications. Contract law might serve to enforce parties’ first-order performance obligations, to enforce second-order remedial obligations, to support the culture of making and keeping agreements more generally, or at least to do no harm to that culture or to people’s ability to act morally. Second, contract can be understood as the legal analog to promise. …

One-Legged Contracting, Ian Ayres, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This response to Robin Bradley Kar & Margaret Jane Radin, Pseudo-Contract and Shared Meaning Analysis, 132 Harv. L. Rev. 1135 (2019), makes three broad points. It criticizes as arbitrary and essentializing Kar and Radin’s insistence of shared meaning as the core of contracting. It argues that even if shared meaning were the sine qua non of contracting, their proposal fails to achieve it because it does not assure that the terms would be cooperatively communicated. And it argues that their proposed enforcement standard would in practice severely limit freedom of contract and likely reduce consumer welfare. There is a …

Contractual Communication, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Response, I will investigate the foundations of both shared and unshared meaning in legal communication. Part I takes a step back from contractual communication and offers a preliminary sketch of a general model of legal communication; the sketch draws on speech act theory and the work of Paul Grice, extending and modifying many of the insights developed by Kar and Radin. Part II turns to contractual communication, differentiating distinct “situations of contractual communication” and interrogating Kar and Radin’s Shared Meaning Analysis. Part III interrogates Kar and Radin’s distinction between “contract” and “pseudo-contract.” The conclusion of the Response briefly …

Boilerplate And Party Intent, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is commonly recognized that parties often do not read or understand contract boilerplate they agree to, and that such parties might not intend all the terms in it. Less often noticed are decisions that favor boilerplate over evidence of the parties’ contrary intent for the very reason that it is boilerplate. This article discusses that phenomenon. It identifies decisions in which courts favor boilerplate terms over other evidence the parties’ intent because it is boilerplate, discusses the rules that explain those outcomes, and examines the reasons behind the rules.

A contractual writing, whether individually negotiated and drafted or boilerplate, …

Interpretation And Construction In Contract Law, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Interpretation determines the meaning of a legal actor’s words and actions, construction their legal effect. Although the interpretation-construction distinction has a long pedigree, contract scholars today rarely attend to it, and the relationship between the two activities remains understudied. This Article provides an account of the interplay between interpretation and construction in contract law.

It begins with the history of the concepts, focusing on the works of Lieber, Williston and Corbin. It adopts Corbin’s complimentary conception, according to which interpretation alone never suffices to determine speech act’s legal effects; a rule of construction is always required. The Article departs from …

The Puzzle Of Pdvsa Bond Prices, Anna Gelpern, Paolo Colla, Mitu Gulati

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Market reports in the summer of 2016 suggest that Venezuela is on the brink of default on upwards of $65 billion in debt. That debt comprises of bonds issued directly by the sovereign and those issued by the state-owned oil company PDVSA. Based on the bond contracts and other legal factors, it is not clear which of these two categories of bonds would fare better in the event of a restructuring. However, market observers are convinced — and we agree — that legal and contractual differences would likely impact the payouts on the bonds if Venezuela defaults. Using a comparison …

What If Fiduciary Obligations Are Like Contractual Ones?, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay, to appear in Contract, Status, and Fiduciary Law (Miller & Gold, 2016), explores three ways fiduciary obligations might be like contractual ones: in the methods lawmakers use or should use to determine the content of the obligation; in the private voluntary acts that generate the obligation; and in the fact that the obligation is a default that parties have the power to alter. The thesis is that to the extent that these similarities exist, they are not especially revealing. Theorists who emphasize the similarities commonly treat contract law as a private power-conferring rule, then analogize the law of …

The Rise And Fall Of Unconscionability As The 'Law Of The Poor', Anne Fleming

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What happened to unconscionability? Here’s one version of the story: The doctrine of unconscionability experienced a brief resurgence in the mid-1960s at the hands of naive, left-liberal, activist judges, who used it to rewrite private consumer contracts according to their own sense of justice. These folks meant well, no doubt, much like present-day consumer protection crusaders who seek to ensure the “fairness” of financial products and services. But courts’ refusal to enforce terms they deemed "unconscionable” served only to increase the cost of doing business with low-income households. Judges ended up hurting the very people they were trying to help. …

The Shadow Of State Secrets, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The shadow of state secrets casts itself longer than previously acknowledged. Between 2001 and 2009 the government asserted state secrets in more than 100 cases, while in scores more litigants appealed to the doctrine in anticipation of government intervention. Contractor cases ranged from breach of contract, patent disputes, and trade secrets, to fraud and employment termination. Wrongful death, personal injury, and negligence suits kept pace, extending beyond product liability to include infrastructure and services, as well as conduct of war. In excess of fifty telecommunications suits linked to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program emerged 2006-2009, with the government acting, variously, …

On Writ Of Certiorari To The United States Court Of Appeals For The Second Circuit, Stolt-Neilsen S.A., V. Animalfeed International, No. 08-1198 (U.S. Oct. 20, 2009), Cornelia T. Pillard

U.S. Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Common-Law Disclosure Duties And The Sin Of Omission: Testing The Meta-Theories, Kathryn Zeiler, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article represents the first attempt to study empirically the factors that cause courts to impose disclosure duties on bargaining parties in some circumstances, but not in others. We analyze data coded from 466 decisions spanning a wide array of jurisdictions and covering over two hundred years. The results are mixed. In some instances our data support the conventional wisdom relating to common-law disclosure duties. For example, we find that courts are more likely to require the disclosure of latent, as opposed to patent, defects and are more likely to require disclosure when the parties are in a fiduciary or …

Brief For Respondents, Green Tree Financial Corp. V. Bazzle, No. 02-634 (U.S. Mar. 27, 2003), ., Cornelia T. Pillard

U.S. Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Consenting To Form Contracts, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this essay, I will identify one theoretical source of the common antipathy towards form contracts and why it is misguided. I contend that the hostility towards form contracts stems in important part from an implicit adoption of a promise-based conception of contractual obligation. I shall maintain that, when one adopts (a) a consent theory of contract based not on promise but on the manifested intention to be legally bound and (b) a properly objective interpretation of this consent, form contracts can be seen as entirely legitimate-though some form terms may properly be subject to judicial scrutiny that would be …

Foreword: Is Reliance Still Dead?, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

One thing I found out when I was a prosecutor is that you should never tell a police officer he cannot do something, for that just serves as an open invitation for him to do it. In recent years, I have learned a similar lesson about legal scholarship which I should probably keep to myself but won't. If you proclaim the existence of a scholarly "consensus," this is an open invitation for academics to try to demolish such a claim.