Contracts Commons^™

The Scope Of Party Autonomy In International Commercial Contracts: A New Dawn?, Akinwumi Olawuyi Ogunranti

LLM Theses

Transnational contracts are almost inevitable in the world today. It follows that a system of law must govern the resolution of disputes that arise from the contracts. The freedom of parties to choose a law that regulates transnational contracts is recognized by most countries as party autonomy. However, the extent of this autonomy has been controversial. This thesis unravels the controversy surrounding the doctrine of party autonomy and, more importantly, provides another perspective to the argument – that the application and scope of party autonomy in countries is determined by historical, colonial, economic, and religious factors. It uses this as …

Cisg Article 79: Exemption Of Performance, And Adaptation Of Contract Through Interpretation Of Reasonableness－Full Of Sound And Fury, But Signifying Something, Yasutoshi Ishida

Pace International Law Review

Article 79 of the CISG provides that “[a] party is not liable for a failure to perform any of his obligations” if the party has encountered a certain impediment defined therein. It was once depicted as “the Convention’s least successful part of the half-century of work.” It has been thirty years since the CISG took effect. However, the interpretation of Article 79 is as old and unsuccessful as ever. For one thing, it has long been interpreted against our intuition, not to exempt a party from specific performance claims. For another, the controversy has long continued unsettled over whether a …

Governing Land Investments: Do Governments Have Legal Support Gaps?, Sam Szoke-Burke, Kaitlin Y. Cordes

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

In the wave of efforts to encourage and support more “responsible” land investments, one aspect has been largely overlooked: are governments equipped with the legal and technical support needed to effectively negotiate and conclude investment contracts that lead to responsible outcomes?

CCSI researched how host governments access legal support in the planning, negotiation, and monitoring of land investments, with a view to better understanding where legal support gaps for governments exist, and how these can be addressed by governments themselves, as well as by donors, support providers and investors.

By scrutinizing “legal support gaps,” CCSI sought to identify possible weak …

Manifest Disregard In International Commercial Arbitration: Whether Manifest Disregard Holds, However Good, Bad, Or Ugly, Chad R. Yates

University of Massachusetts Law Review

Manifest disregard is a common law reason for not enforcing an arbitration award. This principle applies when the arbitrator knew and understood the law, but the arbitrator disregarded the applicable law. Presently, the United States Supreme Court has not made a definite decision on whether manifest disregard is still a valid reason for vacating the award (known as “vacatur”), and the Court is highly deferential to arbitrator decisions. Consequently, the lower courts are split on the issue. For international commercial arbitration awards, manifest disregard can only apply to a foreign award that is decided under United States law or in …

China's Anti-Corruption Crackdown And The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Daniel C.K. Chow

Texas A&M Law Review

China’s highly publicized crackdown on corruption may affect the type and number of cases in China that arise under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”), but it should not be assumed that the crackdown will necessarily lead to fewer FCPA prosecutions. Although there is some overlap of the goals of China’s corruption crackdown and the goals of the FCPA, China’s crackdown also serves important goals of the ruling Communist Party. The main goal of the current crackdown is to reinforce the Party’s power by targeting enemies and rivals of the current leadership. The crackdown is not aimed at prohibiting bribes …

Governing Land Investments: Do Governments Have Legal Support Gaps?, Sam Szoke-Burke, Kaitlin Y. Cordes

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

In the wave of efforts to encourage and support more “responsible” land investments, one aspect has been largely overlooked: are governments equipped with the legal and technical support needed to effectively negotiate and conclude investment contracts that lead to responsible outcomes?

CCSI researched how host governments access legal support in the planning, negotiation, and monitoring of land investments, with a view to better understanding where legal support gaps for governments exist, and how these can be addressed by governments themselves, as well as by donors, support providers and investors.

By scrutinizing “legal support gaps,” CCSI sought to identify possible weak …

Tax Compliance In A Decentralizing Economy, Manoj Viswanathan

Georgia State University Law Review

Tax compliance in the United States has long relied on information from centralized intermediaries—the financial institutions,employers, and brokers that help ensure income is reported and taxes are paid. Yet while the IRS remains tied to these centralized entities,consumers and businesses are not. New technologies, such as sharing economy platforms (companies such as Airbnb, Uber, and Instacart)and the blockchain (the platform on which various cryptocurrencies are based) are providing new, decentralized options for exchanging goods and services.

Without legislative and agency intervention, these technologies pose a critical threat to the reporting system underlying domestic and international tax compliance. Until now, legal …

The Price Of Law: The Case Of The Eurozone's Collective Action Clauses, Elena Carletti, Paolo Colla, Mitu Gulati, Steven Ongena

Faculty Scholarship

Do markets value contract protections? And does the quality of a legal system affect such valuations? To answer these questions we exploit a unique experiment whereby, after January 1, 2013, newly issued sovereign bonds of Eurozone countries under domestic law had to include Collective Action Clauses (CACs) specifying the minimum vote needed to modify payment terms. We find that CAC bonds trade at lower yields than otherwise similar no-CAC bonds; and that the quality of the legal system matters for this differential. Hence, markets appear to see CACs as providing protection against the legal risk embedded in domestic-law sovereign bonds.

A Case Of Motivated Cultural Cognition: China's Normative Arbitration Of International Business Disputes, Pat K. Chew

Articles

The centuries-old conception of judges and arbitrators as highly predictable and objective is being dismantled. In its place, a much more textured, complicated, and challenging understanding of legal decision-making is being constructed. New research on “Motivated Cognition” demonstrates that judges and arbitrators are more human than mechanical, pouring themselves – and the cultural and institutional contexts within which they act – into their decision making. This article extends the emerging model of Motivated Cultural Cognition, a form of Motivated Cognition, to the global stage, investigating arbitration of business disputes between two world-powers: United States and China. Through a first-of-its-kind empirical …

Crossing Troubled Waters: Joining Non-Signatories In Maritime Arbitration - The Co-Optation And Containment Of Consent In United States And British Law, Glenys P. Spence

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Alexa, Who Owns My Pillow Talk? Contracting, Collaterizing, And Monetizing Consumer Privacy Through Voice-Captured Personal Data, Anne Logsdon Smith

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

With over one-fourth of households in the U.S. alone now using voice-activated digital assistant devices such as Amazon’s Echo (better known as “Alexa”) and Google’s Home, companies are recording and transmitting record volumes of voice data from the privacy of people’s homes to servers across the globe. These devices capture conversations about everything from online shopping to food preferences to entertainment recommendations to bedtime stories, and even phone and appliance use. With “Big Data” and business analytics expected to be a $203 billion-plus industry by 2020, companies are racing to acquire and leverage consumer data by selling it, licensing it, …

The Application Of The United Nations Convention On Contracts For The International Sale Of Goods Uniformity Interpretation Principle In U.S., Yuqing Nie

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (hereinafter: CISG) plays an increasingly important role in international sale of goods. However, the CISG is not always correctly applied, especially one of its basic principles – the uniform interpretation principle stated in its Article 7(1), which is usually ignored or incorrectly applied in its contracting States.

The CISG requires high-level uniformity, which requires the CISG to be applied autonomously if there involves parties from two CISG contracting States and the contract governing the transaction has no clause specifying other law as the governing law. Additionally, the CISG …