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Contracts Commons

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Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Contracts

Contracting For Procedure, Kevin E. Davis, Helen Hershkoff Nov 2011

Contracting For Procedure, Kevin E. Davis, Helen Hershkoff

William & Mary Law Review

Judicial decisions of public courts increasingly are based on “contract procedure,” private rules of procedure that the parties draft and assent to before a dispute even has arisen. These rules govern such matters as the forum in which the proceeding will be conducted, whether a jury will be involved in adjudicating the dispute, the scope of rights of discovery, and rules of evidence. The practice deserves greater attention and should raise more profound concerns than the academic literature currently suggests. We argue that contract procedure operates as a form of privatization that effectively outsources government functions to private contracting parties. …


Adjudicating Insurance Policy Disputes: A Critique Of Professor Randall's Poposal To Abandon Contract Law, Jared A. Wilkerson Apr 2011

Adjudicating Insurance Policy Disputes: A Critique Of Professor Randall's Poposal To Abandon Contract Law, Jared A. Wilkerson

W&M Law Student Publications

No abstract provided.


You Do Have To Keep Promises: A Disgorgement Theory Of Contract Remedies, Steve Thel, Peter Siegelman Mar 2011

You Do Have To Keep Promises: A Disgorgement Theory Of Contract Remedies, Steve Thel, Peter Siegelman

William & Mary Law Review

Contract law is generally understood to require no more of a person who breaches a contract than to give the injured promisee the “benefit of the bargain.” The law is thus assumed to permit a promise-breaker to keep any profit remaining from breach, after putting the victim in the position he would have been in had the promise been performed. This conventional description is radically wrong: across a wide range of circumstances, standard contract doctrines actually do require people to keep their promises, or to disgorge their entire profit from breach if they do not. Rather than protecting the expectation …


Fingerprints Of Equitable Estoppel And Promissory Estoppel On The Statute Of Frauds In Contact Law, Stephen J. Leacock Feb 2011

Fingerprints Of Equitable Estoppel And Promissory Estoppel On The Statute Of Frauds In Contact Law, Stephen J. Leacock

William & Mary Business Law Review

This Article evaluates a conundrum and identifies a genuine risk faced by state and federal courts in interpreting and applying the Statute of Frauds to contract law disputes. The Article provides a thorough analytical dissection of the Statute of Frauds as it has been interpreted and applied by the courts in light of the inescapable tension between the Statute’s formalities, mandated by the legislature, and the judiciary’s profound goal of attaining justice and fairness in deciding each contract law dispute in which the Statute is implicated. The Article discusses in depth how the Statute has been construed by state and …


Consent To Retaliation: A Civil Recourse Theory Of Contractual Liability, Nathan B. Oman Jan 2011

Consent To Retaliation: A Civil Recourse Theory Of Contractual Liability, Nathan B. Oman

Faculty Publications

In the ancient Near East, contracts were often solemnized by hacking up a goat. The ritual was an enacted penalty clause: “If I breach this contract, let it be done to me as we are doing to the goat.” This Article argues that we are not so far removed from our goat-hacking forbearers. Legal scholars have argued that contractual liability is best explained by the morality of promise making, or by the need to create optimal incentives in contractual performance. In contrast, this Article argues for the simpler, rawer claim that contractual liability consists of consent to retaliation in the …