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Full-Text Articles in Law
Contract Theory And The Failures Of Public-Private Contracting, Wendy Netter Epstein
Contract Theory And The Failures Of Public-Private Contracting, Wendy Netter Epstein
Wendy Netter Epstein
The market for public-private contracting is huge and flawed. Public-private contracts for services such as prisons and welfare administration tend to result in cost savings at the sacrifice of quality service. For instance, to cut costs, private prisons skimp on security. Public law scholars have studied these problems for decades and have proposed various public law solutions. But the literature is incomplete because it does not approach the problem through a commercial lens. This Article fills that gap. It considers how economic analysis of contract law, in particular efficiency theory and agency theory, bear upon the unique problems of public-private …
The Influence Of Law And Economics Scholarship On Contract Law: Impressions Twenty-Five Years Later, Jeffrey L. Harrison
The Influence Of Law And Economics Scholarship On Contract Law: Impressions Twenty-Five Years Later, Jeffrey L. Harrison
Jeffrey L Harrison
This is an update of a work done in conjunction with a contract law conference 25 years ago. My specific assignment was to assess the impact of law and economics scholarship on contract law. I responded by conducting an empirical study of judicial citations to selected law and economics works in order to ascertain the extent to which judges seemed to be relying on the teachings of law and economics. In effect, the effort was part of a general question that concerns all law professors: Does scholarship matter? I have repeated the study with respect to the scholarship sample selected …
Penalty Default Licenses: A Case For Uncertainty, Kristelia A. García
Penalty Default Licenses: A Case For Uncertainty, Kristelia A. García
Publications
Research on the statutory license for certain types of copyright-protected content has revealed an unlikely symbiosis between uncertainty and efficiency. Contrary to received wisdom, which tells us that in order to increase efficiency, we must increase stability, this Article suggests that uncertainty can actually be used to increase efficiency in the marketplace. In the music industry, the battle over terrestrial performance rights--that is, the right of a copyright holder to collect royalties for plays of a sound recording on terrestrial radio--has raged for decades. In June 2012, in a deal that circumvented the statutory license for sound recordings for the …
Penalty Defaults In Family Law: The Case Of Child Custody, Margaret F. Brinig
Penalty Defaults In Family Law: The Case Of Child Custody, Margaret F. Brinig
Margaret F Brinig
This paper considers whether an amendment to state divorce laws that strengthens its joint custody preference operates as a traditional default rule, specifying what most divorcing couples would choose or as a penalty default rule the parties will attempt to contract around.
While the Oregon statutes that frame our discussion here, like most state laws, do not state an explicit preference for joint custody, shared custody is certainly encouraged by Section 107.179, which refers cases in which the parties cannot agree on joint custody to mediation and by Section 107.105, which requires the court to consider awarding custody jointly. In …
Vertical Boilerplate, James Gibson
Vertical Boilerplate, James Gibson
Law Faculty Publications
Despite what we learn in law school about the “meeting of the minds,” most contracts are merely boilerplate—take-it-or-leave-it propositions. Negotiation is nonexistent; we rely on our collective market power as consumers to regulate contracts’ content. But boilerplate imposes certain information costs because it often arrives late in the transaction and is hard to understand. If those costs get too high, then the market mechanism fails. So how high are boilerplate’s information costs? A few studies have attempted to measure them, but they all use a “horizontal” approach—i.e., they sample a single stratum of boilerplate and assume that it represents the …
Liquid Assets: A Coasian Economic Analysis Of Oregon's Allocation Of Conserved Water Program, Richard A. Grisel
Liquid Assets: A Coasian Economic Analysis Of Oregon's Allocation Of Conserved Water Program, Richard A. Grisel
Richard A Grisel
Diversions for residential, agricultural, recreational, commercial, industrial, and other beneficial uses have had the effect of removing water from rivers and tributaries throughout the western U.S. Another, more recent, competing use is ecological, demonstrated by the legal recognition of instream beneficial uses in some jurisdictions. As awareness of the progressively acute need for reallocation has increased in the arid West, so has interest in water markets and other mechanisms to facilitate transfers across beneficial uses. However, governments and water users face a legacy prior appropriation system that prohibits instream beneficial uses, encourages maximal diversion, stifles water right fungibility, and generally …
Consumer Debt And Usury: A New Rationale For Usury , Robin A. Morris
Consumer Debt And Usury: A New Rationale For Usury , Robin A. Morris
Pepperdine Law Review
No abstract provided.
Contract Theory And The Failures Of Public-Private Contracting, Wendy Netter Epstein
Contract Theory And The Failures Of Public-Private Contracting, Wendy Netter Epstein
All Faculty Scholarship
The market for public-private contracting is huge and flawed. Public-private contracts for services such as prisons and welfare administration tend to result in cost savings at the sacrifice of quality service. For instance, to cut costs, private prisons skimp on security. Public law scholars have studied these problems for decades and have proposed various public law solutions. But the literature is incomplete because it does not approach the problem through a commercial lens. This Article fills that gap. It considers how economic analysis of contract law, in particular efficiency theory and agency theory, bear upon the unique problems of public-private …
The Inalienable Right Of Publicity, Jennifer E. Rothman
The Inalienable Right Of Publicity, Jennifer E. Rothman
All Faculty Scholarship
This article challenges the conventional wisdom that the right of publicity is universally and uncontroversially alienable. Courts and scholars have routinely described the right as a freely transferable property right, akin to patents or copyrights. Despite such broad claims of unfettered alienability, courts have limited the transferability of publicity rights in a variety of instances. No one has developed a robust account of why such limits should exist or what their contours should be. This article remedies this omission and concludes that the right of publicity must have significantly limited alienability to protect the rights of individuals to control the …
The “Ensuing Loss” Clause In Insurance Policies: The Forgotten And Misunderstood Antidote To Anti-Concurrent Causation Exclusions, Chris French
Journal Articles
As a result of the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco which destroyed the city, a clause known as the “ensuing loss” clause was created to address concurrent causation situations in which a loss follows both a covered peril and an excluded peril. Ensuing loss clauses appear in the exclusions section of such policies and in essence they provide that coverage for a loss caused by an excluded peril is nonetheless covered if the loss “ensues” from a covered peril. Today, ensuing loss clauses are found in “all risk” property and homeowners policies, which cover all losses except for …
Freedom Of Contract In An Augmented Reality: The Case Of Consumer Contracts, Scott R. Peppet
Freedom Of Contract In An Augmented Reality: The Case Of Consumer Contracts, Scott R. Peppet
Publications
This Article argues that freedom of contract will take on different meaning in a world in which new technology makes information about places, goods, people, firms, and contract terms available to contracting parties anywhere, at any time. In particular, our increasingly "augmented reality" calls into question leading justifications for distrusting consumer contracts and strengthens traditional understandings of freedom of contract. This is largely a descriptive and predictive argument: This Article aims to introduce contract law to these technologies and consider their most likely effects. It certainly has normative implications, however. Given that the vast majority of consumer contracting occurs in …
The Influence Of Law And Economics Scholarship On Contract Law: Impressions Twenty-Five Years Later, Jeffrey L. Harrison
The Influence Of Law And Economics Scholarship On Contract Law: Impressions Twenty-Five Years Later, Jeffrey L. Harrison
UF Law Faculty Publications
This is an update of a work done in conjunction with a contract law conference 25 years ago. My specific assignment was to assess the impact of law and economics scholarship on contract law. I responded by conducting an empirical study of judicial citations to selected law and economics works in order to ascertain the extent to which judges seemed to be relying on the teachings of law and economics. In effect, the effort was part of a general question that concerns all law professors: Does scholarship matter? I have repeated the study with respect to the scholarship sample selected …
The “Ensuing Loss” Clause In Insurance Policies: The Forgotten And Misunderstood Antidote To Anti-Concurrent Causation Exclusions, Chris French
Christopher C. French
As a result of the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco which destroyed the city, a clause known as the “ensuing loss” clause was created to address concurrent causation situations in which a loss follows both a covered peril and an excluded peril. Ensuing loss clauses appear in the exclusions section of such policies and in essence they provide that coverage for a loss caused by an excluded peril is nonetheless covered if the loss “ensues” from a covered peril. Today, ensuing loss clauses are found in “all risk” property and homeowners policies, which cover all losses except for …
Penalty Defaults In Family Law: The Case Of Child Custody, Margaret F. Brinig
Penalty Defaults In Family Law: The Case Of Child Custody, Margaret F. Brinig
Journal Articles
This paper considers whether an amendment to state divorce laws that strengthens its joint custody preference operates as a traditional default rule, specifying what most divorcing couples would choose or as a penalty default rule the parties will attempt to contract around.
While the Oregon statutes that frame our discussion here, like most state laws, do not state an explicit preference for joint custody, shared custody is certainly encouraged by Section 107.179, which refers cases in which the parties cannot agree on joint custody to mediation and by Section 107.105, which requires the court to consider awarding custody jointly. In …
Self-Enforcing International Agreements And The Limits Of Coercion, Robert E. Scott, Paul B. Stephan
Self-Enforcing International Agreements And The Limits Of Coercion, Robert E. Scott, Paul B. Stephan
Faculty Scholarship
International law provides an ideal context for studying the effects of freedom from coercion on cooperative behavior. To be sure, almost all academic discussions on the subject begin by asking whether international law constitutes "law." But the category of all "international law" is too big and heterogeneous to permit useful analysis. Whether to regard, say, the rules governing the conduct of war or international humanitarian law as "law" presents radically different issues than analyzing the legal character of the Treaty of Rome (the constitutive instrument of the European Community), or the Warsaw Convention (the instrument governing contracts for the carriage …
Bounded Rationality, The Doctrine Of Impracticability, And The Governance Of Relational Contracts, Donald J. Smythe
Bounded Rationality, The Doctrine Of Impracticability, And The Governance Of Relational Contracts, Donald J. Smythe
ExpressO
This article uses a behavioral economics approach to analyze the effects of the doctrine of impracticability on “relational” contracts -- long-term contractual agreements that are typically adapted to changed circumstances and unforeseen contingencies as they arise. In contrast to conventional law and economics studies, the article concludes that the impracticability doctrine has the potential to improve the efficiency and productivity of a wide range of long-term contractual agreements, and offers normative guidelines as to how the doctrine should be applied. The article also examines and rejects various philosophical objections to the impracticability doctrine, such as the arguments that it interferes …
Contractarian Economics And Mediation Ethics: The Case For Customizing Neutrality Through Contingent Fee Mediation, Scott R. Peppet
Contractarian Economics And Mediation Ethics: The Case For Customizing Neutrality Through Contingent Fee Mediation, Scott R. Peppet
Publications
No abstract provided.
"Public Use" And The Independent Judiciary: Condemnation In An Interest-Group Perspective, Donald J. Kochan
"Public Use" And The Independent Judiciary: Condemnation In An Interest-Group Perspective, Donald J. Kochan
Donald J. Kochan
This Article reexamines the doctrine of public use under the Takings Clause and its ability to impede takings for private use through an application of public choice theory. It argues that the judicial validation of interest-group capture of the condemnation power through a relaxed public use standard in Takings Clause review can be explained by interest group politics and public choice theory and by institutional tendencies inherent in the independent judiciary. Legislators can sell the eminent domain power to special interests for almost any use, promising durability in the deal given the low probability that the judiciary will invalidate it …
Foreword, J. Dennis Hynes