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Full-Text Articles in Contracts
Lying And Cheating, Or Self-Help And Civil Disobedience?, Aditi Bagchi
Lying And Cheating, Or Self-Help And Civil Disobedience?, Aditi Bagchi
Brooklyn Law Review
May poor sellers lie to rich buyers? This article argues that, under limited circumstances, sellers may indeed have a license to lie about their goods. Where sellers are losers under unjust background institutions and they reasonably believe that buyers have more than they would under just institutions, lies that result in de minimum transfers can be regarded as a kind of self-help. More generally, what we owe each other in our interpersonal interactions depends on the institutional backdrop. Consumer contract law, including its enforcement regimes, should recognize the social and political contingency of sellers’ obligations to buyers. In other contexts, …
The Impossibility Doctrine In Commercial Contracts: An Empirical Analysis, Uri Benoliel
The Impossibility Doctrine In Commercial Contracts: An Empirical Analysis, Uri Benoliel
Brooklyn Law Review
The impossibility doctrine – under which a contracting party has no duty to perform the agreement if performance thereof is rendered impossible – is a basic building block of U.S. contract law. The prevailing law-and-economics analysis of this doctrine suggests that when contract performance becomes impossible, courts should assign the contractual risk of non-performance to the superior risk bearer, i.e., to the party that can bear said risk at least cost. This article empirically tests, for the first time, the economic theory of the impossibility doctrine. It first hypothesizes that most sophisticated parties to commercial contracts are unlikely to adopt …