Contracts Commons^™

Lack Of Meaningful Choice Defined: Your Job Vs. Your Right To Sue In A Judicial Forum, Sara Lingafelter

Seattle University Law Review

Mandatory arbitration agreements subvert an employee's constitutional right to a judicial forum and generally place unfair burdens on plaintiffs. An employee faced with the option of either signing a mandatory arbitration agreement or losing a job often has no meaningful choice. The Supreme Court, however, has failed to recognize first that Congress did not intend for mandatory arbitration to extend to Title VII claims and second, that employers often leave employees with no meaningful choice regarding mandatory arbitration. Nonetheless, state and federal judges are increasingly recognizing that arbitration agreements may be the product of procedural unconscionability. Accordingly, when employees are …

Symposium - Incomplete Contracts: Judicial Responses, Transactional Planning, And Litigation Strategies - Introduction, Juliet P. Kostritsky

Faculty Publications

This introduction introduces three articles in a Symposium by Richard Craswell, Avery Katz, Robert Scott and George Triantis on the topic of incomplete contracts. The Symposium appears in 56 CASE WES. L. REV. 135 (2005).

The recognition that parties will often fail to achieve completely contingent contracts that provide for an optimal outcome in any future state of the world raises the important question of what role courts could or should play in such contracts.

Scholars working in the law-and-economics tradition have suggested that courts should use a hypothetical bargain approach to incompleteness, filling in terms that are optimal (efficient) …

Inequality Of Bargaining Power, Daniel D. Barnhizer

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Uniform Commercial Code Survey: Sales, Keith A. Rowley, Carolyn L. Dessin, Larry T. Garvin, Robyn L. Meadows

Scholarly Works

2004 Uniform Commercial Code Survey: Sales.

Contracting Spyware By Contract, Jane K. Winn

Articles

The question of what constitutes "spyware" is controversial because many programs that are adware in the eyes of their distributors may be perceived as spyware in the eyes of the end user. Many of these programs are loaded on the computers of end users after the end user has agreed to the terms of a license presented in a click-through interface.

This paper analyzes whether it might be possible to reduce the volume of unwanted software loaded on end users' computers by applying contract law doctrine more strictly. Unwanted programs are often bundled with programs that the end user wants, …

Mercantile Stories & Postcolonial Stories-Stories Of The Code, 12 Tex. Wesleyan L. Rev. 377 (2005), Allen R. Kamp

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Anticipating Litigation In Contract Design, Robert E. Scott, George G. Triantis

Faculty Scholarship

Contract theory does not address the question of how parties design contracts under the existing adversarial system, which relies on the parties to establish relevant facts indirectly by the use of evidentiary proxies. In this Article, we advance a theory of contract design in a world of costly litigation. We examine the efficiency of investment at the front end and back end of the contracting process, where we focus on litigation as the back-end stage. In deciding whether to express their obligations in precise or vague terms, contracting parties implicitly allocate costs between the front and back end. When the …

Risk Management In Long-Term Contracts, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Long-term contracts are designed to manage risk. After a brief discussion of why it is unhelpful to invoke risk aversion for analyzing serious commercial transactions between sophisticated entities, this paper focuses on adaptation to changed circumstances. In particular, it considers the options to abandon and the discretion to change quantity. It then analyzes a poorly designed contract between Alcoa and Essex showing how the parties misframed their problem and designed a long-term contract that was doomed to fail.

Featuring The Three Tenors In La Triviata, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

In the “Three Tenors” case the FTC found an agreement to be an antitrust violation despite the fact that there was no way it could be anticompetitive. The Commission failed to heed the lessons of Coase’s classic paper on the nature of the firm, making a sharp distinction between activities within a firm (legal) and across firm boundaries (not legal). Analytically, there should be no distinction. The decision to integrate activities by contract rather than ownership is a matter of relative transactions costs. Since the boundaries of the firm are, ultimately, an economic decision reflecting the costs and benefits of …

Financial Contracts And The New Bankruptcy Code: Insulating Markets From Bankrupt Debtors And Bankruptcy Judges, Edward R. Morrison, Joerg Riegel

Faculty Scholarship

The reforms of 2005 yield important but subtle changes in the Bankruptcy Code's treatment of financial contracts. They might appear only to eliminate longstanding uncertainty surrounding the protections available to financial contract counterparties, especially counterparties to repurchase transactions and other derivative contracts. But the ambit of the reforms is much broader. The expanded definitions – especially the definition of "swap agreement" – are now so broad that nearly every derivative contract is subject to the Code's protection. Instead of protecting particular counterparties to particular transactions, the Code now protects any counterparty to any derivative contract. Entire markets have been insulated …

"We Insist! Freedom Now": Does Contract Doctrine Have Anything Consitutional To Say?, Hila Keren

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article first exposes the detachment between contract doctrine and the scattered antidiscrimination norms and analyzes the harmful consequences of this detachment. It then creates an original meeting point between the two bodies of law, one of which is intentionally located within contract doctrine. This point is found by dismantling the dominant concept of "freedom OF contact", and especially by defining and establishing the freedom to make a contract.

A Seller's Responsibilities To Remote Purchasers For Breach Of Warranty In The Sales Of Goods Under Washington Law, Thomas J. Holdych

Seattle University Law Review

The article examines Washington law pertaining to a seller's obligations to a remote purchaser with respect to the quality of goods, attending in particular to the judicially created exceptions to the privity requirement. 20 Part II explores the reasons a seller may provide and a buyer may purchase a warranty, reasons that bear on resolution of the question whether the privity requirement should be retained. Parts III and IV analyze not only what warranty obligations a seller may have to a remote purchaser but also the theoretical bases for those obligations and the manner in which those obligations may be …

A Realistic Proposal For The Contract Duress Doctrine, Grace M. Giesel

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

When Trade Secrets Become Shackles: Fairness And The Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine, Elizabeth A. Rowe

UF Law Faculty Publications

Critics of the inevitable disclosure doctrine decry the inconsistency with which courts rule on these cases, and the difficulty in predicting case outcomes. They contend that courts are left to "grapple with a decidedly ... nebulous standard of 'inevitability."' Further, they claim the doctrine undermines the employee's fundamental right to move freely and pursue his or her livelihood.

Ultimately, both the problem and solution here are about fairness: fairness in the employer-employee relationship, fairness in the application of the law, and fairness in providing protection from unfair competition between competing employers. The crux of the opposition to the doctrine, in …

The Contract Drafting Process: Integrating Contract Drafting In A Simulated Law Practice, Charles C. Lewis

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Derivatives And The Bankruptcy Code: Why The Special Treatment?, Franklin R. Edwards, Edward R. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

The collapse of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) in Fall 1998 and the Federal Reserve Bank's subsequent efforts to orchestrate a bailout raise important questions about the structure of the Bankruptcy Code. The Code contains numerous provisions affording special treatment to financial derivatives contracts, the most important of which exempts these contracts from the "automatic stay" and permits counterparties to terminate derivatives contracts with a debtor in bankruptcy and seize underlying collateral. No other counterparty or creditor of the debtor has such freedom; to the contrary, the automatic stay prohibits them from undertaking any act that threatens the debtor's assets. …

On Discovering Doctrine: "Justice" In Contract Agreement, Peter A. Alces

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Reading Wood V. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon With Help From The Kewpie Dolls, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

In Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, Cardozo found consideration in an apparently illusory contract by implying a reasonable effort obligation. Unbeknownst to Cardozo, Wood had agreed to represent Rose O'Neill, the inventory of the kewpie doll in an earlier exclusive contract. Wood sued O'Neill two months prior to entering into the Lucy arrangement. That contract included an explicit best efforts clause. The failure to include such a clause in this contract was, quite likely, deliberate, suggesting that Wood was trying to avoid making a binding commitment to Lucy. The paper examines both the kewpie doll and Lucy contract in some …

A Pluralist Approach To Interpretation: Wills And Contracts, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This account of legal interpretation focuses mainly on wills and contracts. It adopts a pluralist approach, one that treats a number of factors as potentially relevant and does not assume that all relevant factors necessarily reduce to one overarching inquiry that is the same whatever legal text is being interpreted.

Incomplete Contracts And The Theory Of Contract Design, Robert E. Scott, George G. Triantis

Faculty Scholarship

We are delighted to accept this invitation to write a short essay on the economic theory of incomplete contracts and to illuminate its current and potential impact on the legal analysis of contracts and contract law. Economic contract theory has made significant inroads in legal scholarship over the past fifteen years, and this is a good time to take stock of its strengths and weaknesses. Several recent publications in the Yale Law Journal have offered evaluations of the contributions of contract theory.' In this essay, we offer our opinion as to its future path in legal scholarship. In particular, we …

From Imperial China To Cyberspace: Contracting Without The State, David D. Friedman

Faculty Publications

In 1895, as part of the treaty of Shimonoseki, China ceded the island of Taiwan to Japan. The Japanese government wished to maintain the existing legal system; in order to do so it had to discover what that legal system was.

One feature of that legal system was the combination of elaborate contractual practice with an almost total absence of contract law. Imperial China had no equivalent of our civil lawsuits. A merchant who had sold goods on credit and not been paid could, if he wished, report his debtor to the district magistrate for the crime of swindling him-but …

Rediscovering Williston, Mark L. Movsesian

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article is an intellectual history of classical contracts scholar Samuel Williston. Professor Movsesian argues that the conventional account of Williston's jurisprudence presents an incomplete and distorted picture. While much of Williston 's work can strike a contemporary reader as arid and conceptual, there are strong elements of pragmatism as well. Williston insists that doctrine be justified in terms of real-world consequences, maintains that rules can have only presumptive force, and offers institutional explanations for judicial restraint. As a result, his scholarship shares more in common with today's new formalism than commonly supposed. Even the undertheorized quality of Williston 's …

Naked Before The Law: Reality Porn And The Capacity To Contract, Benjamin J. Cooper

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note examines the legal challenges surrounding reality pornography, particularly through the lens of the Girls Gone Wild series, highlighting the tension between First Amendment protections for producers and the rights of participants. It argues that the legal framework governing consent, exploitation, and contractual agreements in this context is unclear and often fails to protect participants, many of whom face severe consequences. The analysis underscores the complexities of balancing public interest, contractual capacity, and the rights of minors in this lucrative yet legally fraught industry.

The Bewitchment Of Intelligence: Language And Ex Post Illusions Of Intention, Jeffrey M. Lipshaw

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

Lawyers who negotiate and litigate over complex deals have an intuitive notion of the value of what they do in connection with the contract. The arguments around technical contract language often are a lawyers' game; in most cases, what is clear would have been clear on a handshake; and what is tightly negotiated bears only a random relationship to the areas of future dispute. If they happen to have drafted tight and clear language around the particular matter in dispute, it is as much luck as foresight. Thereafter complex agreements can have binding effect for years, but most of the …

Contractual Incompleteness: A Transactional Perspective, Avery W. Katz

Faculty Scholarship

Recent scholarship in the field of contract law has concentrated on contractual incompleteness-that is, on the fact that except in the simplest and most basic transactions, contracting parties do not work out all of the relevant details and contingencies of their relationship at the outset. The reasons for incomplete contracts are varied. Sometimes parties deliberately leave terms unresolved, trusting future negotiations or social norms to fill in any problems that emerge. Other times, they leave terms unresolved without realizing they have done so, in part because they devote limited attention or resources to their negotiations and in part because contracts …

Suing Amy: A Love Story, Cameron Stracher

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Comptroller Of City Of New York V. Mayor Of New York (Decided July 29, 2004), Leslie Spitalnick

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Unhappy Contracts: The Case Of Divorce Settlements, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

This paper examines a particular type of contracts that is, sadly, increasingly frequent: the agreements produced by divorcing couples. They are unhappy contracts, agreements produced as a necessary part of exit from what is now suboptimal marriage. They are virtually required by many states and are, in theory at least, closely monitored by courts since, when children are involved, they will be incorporated into court orders.What parties to unhappy contracts do is attempt to minimize losses, rather than maximize gain. How are contracts structured that will do this, and how does a difference in the size or power of the …

Textual Harassment: A New Historicist Reappraisal Of The Parol Evendence Rule With Gender In Mind, Hila Keren

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Joseph Baxendale, James J. Fishman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The defendant in the great case of Hadley v. Baxendale is Joseph Baxendale, managing partner of Pickford and Co., the common carrier that delayed the delivery of the Hadley's shaft. Baxendale was named the defendant, because Pickfords was a partnership and did not incorporate until 1901. Joseph Baxendale was born in 1785, the son of a Lancastershire surgeon. In 1806, he moved to London, where he worked for a wholesale linen draper. Later, he became a partner in that firm, and developed the managerial and accounting skills that would serve him so well at Pickfords.