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Full-Text Articles in Contracts
Of Fine Lines, Blunt Instruments And Half-Truths: Business Acquisition Agreements And The Right To Lie, Jeffrey M. Lipshaw
Of Fine Lines, Blunt Instruments And Half-Truths: Business Acquisition Agreements And The Right To Lie, Jeffrey M. Lipshaw
ExpressO
In this article, I expand upon a happy coincidence (for scholars) in reconciling the overlap between contract and fraud. Both the recent book by Ian Ayres and Gregory Klass and the Delaware Court of Chancery in Abry Partners Acquisition V, L.P. v. F& W Acquisition, LLC addressed the issue of promissory fraud – the making of a contract as to which the promisor had no intention of performing. Each treatment, however, in focusing on fraudulent affirmative representations, falls short of (a) recognizing the fundamental aspect of deceptive promising in a complex deal, namely the half-truth, (b) articulating an appropriate doctrinal …
The Best Puffery Article Ever, David A. Hoffman
The Best Puffery Article Ever, David A. Hoffman
All Faculty Scholarship
This Article provides the first extensive legal treatment of an important defense in the law of fraud and contracts: puffery. Legal authorities commonly say they make decisions about whether defendants should be able to utter exaggerated, optimistic, lies based on assumptions about buyer behavior, concluding that consumers do not rely on such speech. However, as the Article shows, such analyses are proxies for a deeper analytical question: does the speech encourage or discourage a type of consumption activity that the court deems welfare maximizing? The Article presents a novel constitutional analysis of puffery doctrine that focuses on the meaning of …