Law Commons^™

The Fourth Circuit’S Treatment Of Anunconventional Obligation Inwegmann V. Tramontin, Nathan W. Friedman

Journal of Civil Law Studies

No abstract provided.

Boca Park Marketplace Syndications Grp., L.L.C. V. Higco, Inc., 133 Nev. Adv. Op. 114 (Dec. 28, 2017), Tamara Cannella

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court held the declaratory judgment exception to claim preclusion applies when the initial action sought only declaratory relief.

Codify This: Exculpatory Contracts In Wisconsin Recreational Businesses, Blake A. Nold

Marquette Law Review

It is common practice for recreational businesses, such as ski resorts or fitness centers, to require their customers to sign a release of liability form. The purpose of this release form is to relieve the business from any potential liability in the event a customer suffers an injury. However, since 1982, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has yet to uphold an exculpatory contract. Rather than attempting to lay out principles and guidelines for how to draft an exculpatory agreement—in hopes that it will be ruled enforceable—this Comment proposes that Wisconsin recreational businesses, like ski resorts or gyms, should not require customers …

Poke Your Nose Into Your Clients' Businesses (If You Want To Understand Their Contracts), James W. Bowers

Maine Law Review

Thirty years ago Grant Gilmore argued that “Contract” was dead. This lecture, delivered as 2004 Godfrey Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Maine School of Law, considers the cause of death. Since the expired doctrines arose in a common law process, the lecture argues their demise resulted from the failings of lawyers, especially lawyers' commitment to wooden, formalist legal methods. I explore some of the reasons why lawyers became committed to these methods, and argue that even were nineteenth-century formalistic practices resurrected, modern lawyers must still be prepared to understand the potential effects business contexts might have in contract disputes and …

Tension And Reconciliation In Canadian Contract Law Casebooks, David Sandomierski

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Canadian common law contract law casebooks are beset with a tension. On the one hand, they all reveal a sustained commitment to the “wholesale assault on the jurisprudence of forms, concepts, and rules” that typifies American Legal Realism and its intellectual descendants. Concern with underlying values, functional reasoning, social realities, and policy thinking pervades the explicit messages of Canadian contract law casebooks and their editors’ related writings. On the other hand, the two casebooks most frequently assigned embody an allegiance to rules and courts that has a close kinship with the classical attitudes purportedly rejected. They convey a monolithic image …

Reconsidering Contractual Consent: Why We Shouldn't Worry Too Much About Boilerplate And Other Puzzles, Nathan B. Oman

Faculty Publications

Our theoretical approaches to contract law have dramatically over-estimated the importance of voluntary consent. The central thesis of this article is that voluntary consent plays at best a secondary role in the normative justification of contract law. Rather, contract law should be seen as part of an evolutionary process of finding solutions to problems of social organization in markets. Like natural evolution, this process depends on variation and feedback. Unlike natural evolution, both the variation and the feedback mechanisms are products of human invention. On this theory, consent serves two roles in contract law. First, consent makes freedom of contract …

Pluralism Applied: A Concordant Approach To Selecting Contract Rules, Samuel F. Ernst

Marquette Law Review

Contract rules can be justified by utilitarian theories (such as efficiency theory), which are concerned with promoting rules that enhance societal wealth and utility. Contract rules can also be justified by rights-based theories (such as promissory and reliance theories), which are concerned with protecting the contractual freedom and interests ofthe individual parties to the contract. Or, contract rules can be analyzed through the lenses of a host of other theories, including critical legal theory, bargain theory, and so on. Because no single, unitary theory can ever explain the complex body of laws and societal conventions surrounding contracts, the best rule …

Teaching Gender As A Core Value In The Firstyear Contracts Class, Kerri Lynn Stone

Kerri Stone

No abstract provided.

Amending Corporate Charters And Bylaws, Albert H. Choi, Geeyoung Min

All Faculty Scholarship

Recently, courts have embraced the contractarian theory that corporate charters and bylaws constitute a “contract” between the shareholders and the corporation and have been more willing to uphold bylaws unilaterally adopted by the directors. This paper examines the contractarian theory by drawing a parallel between amending charters and bylaws, on the one hand, and amending contracts, on the other. In particular, the paper compares the right to unilaterally amend corporate bylaws with the right to unilaterally modify contract terms, and highlights how contract law imposes various limitations on the modifying party’s discretion. More generally, when the relationship of contracting parties …

Sovereign Debt As A Commodity: A Contract Law Perspective, Dania Thomas

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

The ad hoc institutional configurations that facilitated the resolution of sovereign insolvency for over thirty years are fragmenting. Recent court decisions interpreting the pari passu clause in sovereign debt contracts reveal the dangers of pressuring common law courts to enforce contracts and mediate structural flaws in the market. The courts have dismantled sovereign protections in international law and common law checks and balances. They have gone beyond precedent to innovate remedies justified by interpreting a clause whose meaning and function were not clearly understood by the contracting parties themselves. They have also opened up a possible inter-creditor obligation that circumvents …

Solid V. Eighth Judicial Dist. Court, 133 Nev. Adv. Op. 17 (Apr. 27, 2017), Hunter Davidson

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court interpreted Nevada Supreme Court Rules (“SCR” or the “Rules”) on Electronic Coverage of Court Proceedings: (1) My Entertainment TV (MET) is a “news reporter” under SCR 229(1)(c) because it collects, edits, and publishes footage concerning local events for public dissemination; (2) Clark County court proceedings footage has the educational or informational purpose required by SCR 241; (3) camera presence in the court room alone does not overcome the presumption permitting electronic recording of court proceedings under SCR 230; and (4) contract provisions must be read together, and the result should comport with the SCR on electronic coverage of …

“Breaking Bad” Contracts: Bargaining For Masculinity In Popular Culture, Lenora Ledwon

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

This Article examines the award-winning television show, Breaking Bad, to illustrate how the idea of a contract in popular culture can become inflected with a style of retrograde masculinity. Deals in Breaking Bad take place in the classic contract imaginary, which resembles the classic Western shootout: two antagonists face each other down in a duel. The show interrogates the frontier thesis, with its links to the American Dream and dangerous masculinities, through the ruthless contracts of Walter White.

Arrested Development: Rethinking The Contract Age Of Majority For The Twenty-First Century Adolescent, Wayne Barnes

Faculty Scholarship

The contract age of majority is currently age 18. Contracts entered into by minors under this age are generally voidable at the minor’s option. This contract doctrine of capacity is based on the policy of protecting minors from their own poor financial decisions and lack of adultlike judgment. Conversely, the age of 18 is currently set as the arbitrary age at which one will be bound to her contract, since this is the current benchmark for becoming an “adult.” However, this article questions the accuracy of age 18 for this benchmark. Until comparatively recently, the age of contract majority had …

We Need Protection From Our Protectors: The Nature, Issues, And Future Of The Federal Trust Responsibility To Indians, Daniel I.S.J. Rey-Bear, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The federal trust responsibility to Indians essentially entails duties of good faith, loyalty, and protection. While often thought of as unique to federal Indian policy, it developed from and reflects common law principles of contracts, property, trusts, foreign relations/international law, and constitutional law. However, several issues preclude a greater understanding and implementation of the federal trust responsibility. These include Executive Branch efforts to avoid liability, neocolonial judicial activism, and episodic congressional attention. Enactment of legislation to reaffirm and modernize the federal trust responsibility through greater self-determination, integration, elevation, oversight, and funding should help overcome these issues to improve federal Indian …

Fiduciary-Isms: A Study Of Academic Influence On The Expansion Of The Law, Daniel B. Yeager

Daniel B. Yeager

Fiduciary law aspires to nullify power imbalances by obligating strong parties to give themselves over to servient parties. For example, due to profound imbalances of legal know-how, lawyers must as fiduciaries pursue their clients’ interests, not their own, lest clients get lost in the competitive shuffle. As a peculiar hybrid of status and contract relations, politics and law, compassion and capitalism, fiduciary law is very much in vogue in academic circles. As vogue as it is, there remains room for my “Fiduciary-isms...”, a meditation on the expansion of fiduciary law from its origins in the law of trusts through partnerships, …

Mechanisms For Consultation And Free, Prior And Informed Consent In The Negotiation Of Investment Contracts, Sam Szoke-Burke, Kaitlin Y. Cordes

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Investor-state contracts are regularly used in low-and middle-income countries to grant concessions for land-based investments, such as agricultural or forestry projects. These contracts are rarely negotiated in the presence of, or with meaningful input from, the people who risk being adversely affected by the project. This has serious implications for requirements for meaningful consultation, and, where applicable, free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), and is particularly important in situations in which investor-state contracts grant the investor rights to lands or resources over which the community has legitimate claims.

The paper explores how consultation and FPIC processes can be integrated into …

Convergence Between Australian Common Law And English Common Law: The Rule Against Penalties In The Age Of Freedom Of Contract, Man Yip, Yihan Goh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This note discusses the High Court of Australia decision of Paciocco v Australia and New Zealand Bank Group Limited on the rule against penalty clauses and situates its importance in light of the UK Supreme Court decision of Cavendish Square Holding BV v Talal El Makdessi and Beavis v ParkingEye Ltd.
It compares the analytical frameworks laid down in the two cases and
points out some unresolved issues in this area of law even following
these cases.

Energy Contracts And Its Dispute Resolution Through Arbitration, عبد الله عبد العزيز عمر العكبري

Theses

This dissertation examines the aspects of the energy contracts and the needs to implement the Arbitration on it, as an Alternative Dispute Resolution (“ADR”), in MENA & North Africa, with an emphasizing on UAE Vis-à-vis the other GCC countries. And the Methodology I follow is the comparing and analyzing methods.

The major challenge in this dissertation is that I did my best to proof the legal nature of the energy contracts, either as civil contracts or administrative contracts. However, the key thing here is to rely on the contained Set of rules and elements in such contract especially where the …

Rise Of The Digital Regulator, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

The administrative state is leveraging algorithms to influence individuals’ private decisions. Agencies have begun to write rules to shape for-profit websites such as Expedia and have launched their own online tools such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s mortgage calculator. These digital intermediaries aim to guide people toward better schools, healthier food, and more savings. But enthusiasm for this regulatory paradigm rests on two questionable assumptions. First, digital intermediaries effectively police consumer markets. Second, they require minimal government involvement. Instead, some for-profit online advisers such as travel websites have become what many mortgage brokers were before the 2008 financial crisis. …

Enforcing Corporate Social Responsibility Codes Under Private Law: On The Disciplining Power Of Legal Doctrine, Jan M. Smits

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

A central question in the debate on corporate social responsibility is to what extent CSR codes can be enforced among private parties. This contribution argues that this question is best answered by reference to the applicable doctrinal legal system. Such a doctrinal approach has recently regained importance in American scholarship, while it is still the prevailing method of legal analysis in Europe. Applying a doctrinal analysis of CSR codes allows for the possibility of private law enforcement, that is, enforcement by means of contract or tort, dependent on three different elements: the exact type of claim that is brought, the …

Betraying Formality For False Equity: The Danger Of Transposing Equitable Considerations Into Contract Law To Remedy Regulatory Pitfalls, Elliott Morris

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

No abstract provided.

Reason And Reasonableness: The Necessary Diversity Of The Common Law, Frederic G. Sourgens

Maine Law Review

This Article addresses the central concept of “reasonableness” in the common law and constitutional jurisprudence. On the basis of three examples, the common law of torts, the common law of contracts, and Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, the Article notes that different areas of the law follow fundamentally inconsistent utilitarian, pragmatic, and formalist reasonableness paradigms. The significance of this diversity of reasonableness paradigms remains largely under-theorized. This Article submits that the diversity of reasonableness paradigms is a necessary feature of the common law. It theorizes that the utilitarian, pragmatic and formalistic paradigms are structural elements driving the common law norm-generation process. This …

Civil Law Pulsations Along The Latin American Periphery, Ángel R. Oquendo

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

The civil law system shows its true face as it travels from the Continental European core to the Latin American periphery. Many of the principal institutions have found a home and thrived in the new and radically different environment. One can best study them there by contemplating how they have preserved some of their most basic features despite having transformed themselves into something else.

The notion of the civil law tradition and that of codification have themselves undergone this dialectic of transformation and preservation. So have the traditional approach to contractual interpretation and to third-party agreements and the common proscriptions …

The Concurrent Liability In Contract And Tort Under U.S. And English Law: To What Extent Plaintiff Is Entitled To Recover For Damages Under Tort Claim?, Phutchaya Numngern

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

Both U.S. and English courts has confronted with the concurrent situations mostly occurring in the cases where 1) the plaintiff asks for the recovery in tort claim despite the existence of contractual relationship or 2) the plaintiff asserts contract claim but the defendant contends that the issue at bar should be sound in tort rather than in contract. After studying all relevant cases and academic writings, this thesis found that both U.S. and English systems generally recognize concurrent tort claim as an elective right. The courts have attempted to provide the justified rationales either to allow the plaintiffs tort claim …

Guide To Land Contracts: Forestry Projects, International Senior Lawyers Project, Kaitlin Y. Cordes, Sam Szoke-Burke

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Agricultural investment contracts and forestry projects can be complex, with complicated provisions that are difficult to understand. To assist non-lawyers in better understanding agricultural investment contracts, such as those available on the Open Land Contracts repository, CCSI has developed a Guide to Land Contracts: Forestry Projects.

This Guide, prepared by International Senior Lawyers Project staff and volunteers in collaboration with the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, aims to assist the Open Land Contracts repository users in unpacking the technical provisions and language typically found in forestry contracts in order to better understand the contracts and the potential implications of …

Paying For Privacy And The Personal Data Economy, Stacy-Ann Elvy

Articles & Chapters

Growing demands for privacy and increases in the quantity and variety of consumer data have engendered various business offerings to allow companies, and in some instances consumers, to capitalize on these developments. One such example is the emerging “personal data economy” (PDE) in which companies, such as Datacoup, purchase data directly from individuals. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the “pay-for-privacy” (PFP) model requires consumers to pay an additional fee to prevent their data from being collected and mined for advertising purposes. This Article conducts a simultaneous in-depth exploration of the impact of burgeoning PDE and PFP models. It …

If You've Seen One, You Have Not Seen Them All, David Spratt

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Why Flexibility Matters: Inequality And Contract Pluralism, Jeremiah A. Ho

Faculty Publications

In the decade since the Great Recession, various contract scholars have observed that one reason the financial crisis was so “great” was due in part to contract law—or, more precisely, the failures of contract law for not curbing the risky lending practices in the American housing market. However, there is another reason why contracts made that recession so great: contracts furthered inequality. In recent years, when economic inequality has become a dominant national conversation topic, we can see development of that inequality in the Great Recession. And indeed, contract law was complicit. While contractual flexibility and innovation were available to …

"The Reel Story: Film Festivals And Markets" From The Pop Culture Business Handbook For Cons And Festivals, Jon Garon

Faculty Scholarship

This article is part of a series of book excerpts from The Pop Culture Business Handbook for Cons and Festivals, which provides the business, strategy, and legal reference guide for fan conventions, film festivals, musical festivals, and cultural events.There may be between three thousand and four thousand film festivals running this year. Compared to fewer than 750 feature films that are released theatrically during the year, the overwhelming number of film festivals make this experience somewhat unique within the Con culture. A film festival attracts its audience in order to highlight the best work it can showcase and to recognize …

Contract, Power, And The Value Of Donative Promises, Sabine Tsuruda

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.