Contracts Commons^™

The Fiduciary Character Of Agency And The Interpretation Of Instructions, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter in a forthcoming book justifies the conventional characterization of common-law agency as a fiduciary relationship. An agent serves as the principal’s representative in dealings with third parties and facts about the world, situating the agent as an extension of the principal for legally-salient purposes. A principal’s power to furnish instructions to the agent is the fundamental mechanism through which the principal exercises control over the agent, a requisite for an agency relationship. The agent’s fiduciary duty to the principal provides a benchmark for the agent’s interpretation of those instructions. The chapter draws on philosophical literature on the identity …

Lawyers: Gatekeepers Of The Sovereign Debt Market?, Michael Bradley, Irving De Lira Salvatierra, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

The claim that lawyers act as gatekeepers or certifiers in financial transactions is widely discussed in the legal literature. There has, however, been little empirical examination of the claim. We test the hypothesis that law firms have replaced investment banks as the gatekeepers of the market for sovereign debt. Our results suggest that hiring outside law firms sends a negative signal to the market regarding the pending issuance; a finding that is inconsistent with the thesis that outside law firms primarily play a certification role in the sovereign debt market.

Preemption Without Borders: The Modern Conflation Of Tort And Contract Liabilities, Max N. Helveston

Georgia Law Review

Medical device jurisprudence has taken a turn for the worse recently, turning a deaf ear to patients who have been injured or killed by devices and covertly expanding the boundaries of federal preemption in ways that threaten fundamental contractual principles. Ever since the Court's holding in Riegel v. Medtronic, district and appellate courts have effectively immunized the manufacturers of certain devices from contract, as well as tort, liabilities. The lower courts' rulings are not only

problematic as a matter of law, but raise novel concerns about federal regulatory preemption undermining individuals' contract rights. A comprehensive analysis of the Court's medical …

Intentions, Compliance, And Fiduciary Obligations, Stephen R. Galoob, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

This essay investigates the structure of fiduciary obligations, specifically the obligation of loyalty. Fiduciary obligations differ from promissory obligations with respect to the possibility of “accidental compliance.” Promissory obligations can be satis- fied through behavior that conforms to a promise, even if that behavior is done for inappropriate reasons. By contrast, fiduciary loyalty necessarily has an intentional dimension, one that prevents satisfaction through accidental compliance. The intentional dimension of fiduciary loyalty is best described by what we call the “shaping” account. This account both explains the conscientiousness that loyalty demands and improves on other accounts of the intentional dimension of …

Mass Arbitration And Democratic Legitimacy, David Horton

University of Colorado Law Review

This Article reviews Margaret Jane Radin's dazzling new book, Boilerplate. Radin makes two central claims about the widespread use of adhesion contracts. First, she argues that the heavy saturation of fine print causes "normative degradation," the erosion of contract law's bedrock requirement of consent. Second, and more provocatively, she contends that the lockstep use of standard forms permits private actors to override the public laws and thus causes "democratic degradation." This Article uses developments in consumer and employment arbitration as a proving ground for Radin's democratic degradation thesis. Spurred on by the United States Supreme Court's interpretation of the Federal …

Arbitration And The Contract Exchange, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

A contract exchange, defined as an organized marketplace for the creation or trading of specific contracts, provides benefits to its members as well as the public at large. But legal disputes can arise on contract exchanges, just as they do anywhere else, and those disputes can be litigated, mediated, arbitrated, or resolved in some other way. This Essay claims that arbitration, rather than litigation, is a particularly useful and appropriate means for resolving exchange-related disputes, and that this is true not only for traditional contract exchanges, like the Chicago Board of Trade, but also for online "consumer contract exchanges," such …

The Contractualization Of Family Law In The United States, Fernanda Nicola, Adrienne Hunter Jules

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Contract Theory – Who Needs It?, Avery W. Katz

Faculty Scholarship

Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause – that it must be lived forward.
Soren Kierkegaard

Both law students and law teachers have traditionally been drawn to conceptual projects that attempt to systematize the field of contract law. The reasons for this are easy to see: the field is doctrinally complex, few beginning students have any substantial experience with the kinds of fact patterns that arise in the cases, and the law is a locus of contestation over fundamental issues of economic liberalism that go to the heart …

The Anomaly Of Entrapment, Jessica A. Roth

Articles

Now in our second decade after 9/11, we are firmly in the prevention era of law enforcement. Faced with the unacceptable consequences of identifying threats too late, government agents are moving aggressively to identify potential terrorists before they strike. Undercover agents and confidential informants necessarily play a large role in such efforts. As a result of such operations, we have seen a number of cases brought to trial in the federal courts in which defendants have asserted the entrapment defense. To date, the defense has not succeeded. However, as a consequence of these cases, the United States Supreme Court may …

Order On Defendant's Motion To Dismiss (Mary Ann Digan Et Al.), Elizabeth E. Long

Superior Court of Fulton County: Metro Atlanta Business Case Division Opinions

No abstract provided.

Order On Defendants' Motion For Partial Summary Judgment (North Star Jefferson, Llc Et Al.), Elizabeth E. Long

Superior Court of Fulton County: Metro Atlanta Business Case Division Opinions

No abstract provided.

Order On Georgia-Pacific's Motion And Memorandum To Exclude Damages (Ezgreen Assoc. Llc), John J. Goger

Superior Court of Fulton County: Metro Atlanta Business Case Division Opinions

No abstract provided.

Unilateral Reordering In The Reel World, Jake Linford

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Private Copyright Reform, Kristelia A. García

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

The government is not the only player in copyright reform, and perhaps not even the most important. Left to free market negotiation, risk averse licensors and licensees are contracting around the statutory license for certain types of copyright-protected content, and achieving greater efficiency via private ordering. This emerging phenomenon, herein termed “private copyright reform,” presents both adverse selection and distributive justice concerns: first, circumvention of the statutory license goes against legislative intent by allowing for the reduction, and even elimination, of statutorily mandated royalties owed to non-parties. In addition, when presented without full term disclosure, privately determined royalty rates can …

Contract Texts, Contract Teaching, Contract Law: Comment On Lawrence Cunningham, Contracts In The Real World, Brian H. Bix

Washington Law Review

Lawrence Cunningham’s Contracts in the Real World offers a good starting place for necessary conversations about how contract law should be taught, and, more generally, for when and how cases—in summary form or in longer excerpts—are useful in teaching the law. This Article tries to offer some reasons for thinking that their prevalence may reflect important truths about contract law in particular and law and legal education in general.

Unilateral Reordering In The Reel World, Jake Linford

Washington Law Review

Professor Larry Cunningham’s new book, Contracts in the Real World, demonstrates that there is much to learn about contract law from a few well-chosen stories. The goal of this Essay is to provide a similar service, relying on stories gleaned from movies and television—contracts in the “reel world,” so to speak—to illustrate and then undermine the traditional stories told about contract formation and modification. We can learn much from the scenes discussed herein about how consumers might be led to think contracts are formed, and perhaps misled about the certainty contracts provide.

Reflections On Contracts In The Real World: History, Currency, Context, And Other Values, Lawrence A. Cunningham

Washington Law Review

It is gratifying to read that this symposium issue of the Washington Law Review was stimulated by Contracts in the Real World. Thanks to the editors for the opportunity to ruminate on the place of the book’s approach—stressing context through stories—in the tradition of contracts pedagogy. To that end, Part I first pinpoints relevant historical milestones in the field of contracts casebooks. Building on that historical grounding, Part II then highlights the values of currency and context that the stories approach epitomizes. Turning more speculative, Part III considers the value of this approach from the perspective of the purpose …

Mandatory Rules And Default Rules In Insurance Contracts, Tom Baker, Kyle D. Logue

Law & Economics Working Papers

The economic analysis of contract law can organized around two general questions: (1) what are the efficient or welfare-maximizing substantive rules of contract law; and (2) once those rules have been identified, when if ever should they be made mandatory and when should they be merely “default rules” that the parties can contract around if they wish? Much of contract theory over the past twenty years has been devoted to developing answers to those two questions. The same two questions can be posed with respect to the rules of insurance law. Although previous scholars have examined particular substantive doctrines of …

The Perspective Of Law On Contract, Aditi Bagchi

Washington Law Review

What is the perspective of law on contract? This Article will consider two dimensions of the perspective we offer students. Part I will consider how we present the nature of contract law. That is, it will explore the extent to which traditional methods of teaching unduly underplay indeterminacy and disagreement. In that Part I distinguish between inductive and deductive legal reasoning and suggest we may give short shrift to the former in teaching. Part II will consider the attitude of the law toward contract as a social practice. Here I distinguish between internal and external perspectives on law and suggest …

Cases And Controversies: Some Things To Do With Contracts Cases, Charles L. Knapp

Washington Law Review

As a co-author of one of the two dozen or more currently-in-print Contracts casebooks, I obviously have both a point of view about, and a personal stake in, the survival of this particular method of instruction. Whether the legal casebook—or any other book, in the form of bound sheets of paper—will remain a part of our academic culture much longer is clearly up for grabs, however. Electronic records have so many advantages over the printed page that, at least for many purposes, they will surely become the dominant form of preserving, retrieving, and transmitting information, if indeed they are not …

Visual Clarity In Contract Drafting, Karin Mika

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

No abstract provided.

Contract Stories: Importance Of The Contextual Approach To Law, Larry A. Dimatteo

Washington Law Review

How law is taught is at the center of the debate over the need to change legal education to better prepare students for a difficult and changing marketplace for legal services. This Article analyzes the benefits of using “stories” to teach law. The stories to be discussed relate to contract law: this Article asks whether they can be used to improve the method and content of teaching law. The ruminations offered on teaching contract law, however, are also relevant to teaching other core, first-year law courses.

Unpopular Contracts And Why They Matter: Burying Langdell And Enlivening Students, Jennifer S. Taub

Washington Law Review

Thus, the purpose of this piece is to provide an alternative: a transformation of how Contracts is taught in law schools so that we meet a variety of educational objectives. This is less of a prescription than it is a resolution made in the public sphere: a promise to shake things up in my own classroom and thus hopefully do better by students in the long run. It is also the beginning of a search to benchmark against the practices of others, and to seek input from those who have already begun to transform their Contracts teaching materials and methods. …

Mining Contracts: How To Read And Understand Them, International Senior Lawyers Project, Openoil, Revenue Watch Institute-Natural Resource Governance Institue, Vale Columbia Center On Sustainable International Investment

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Books

In December 2013, a diverse group of 14 experts from Africa, Asia, North and South America, and Europe worked together for five days to produce a user-friendly guide in English and in French on "Mining Contracts: How to Read and Understand Them," to help policy makers, civil society, citizens, and the media understand the often complex and opaque terms of mining contracts. With increasing calls for contract transparency – and the growing recognition of the importance of the terms of contracts for resource-rich countries – this book explains in layman’s terms the principal features of a contract, compares different approaches …

Contract As Pattern Language, Erik F. Gerding

Washington Law Review

This essay examines how patterns enable the transformation of contractual provisions into contracts, contracts into transactions, and transactions into markets. Although contract design patterns are broader than contract boilerplate (as described in Part II.C. below), some of the extensive legal scholarship on boilerplate19 helps explain how contract patterns generate agreements, transactions, and markets. The work of Henry Smith on the modularity of contract boilerplate proves particularly useful in this regard. Contract patterns perform several functions. Contract patterns break complex problems and bargains into components. Attorneys can then repeatedly apply these particular solutions to similar problems. Patterns also serve as heuristics …

Case Comment: A New Framework For The Implication Of Terms In Fact, Yihan Goh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In Sembcorp Marine Ltd v PPL Holdings Pte Ltd the Singapore Court of Appeal once again reaffirmed the Singapore courts’ rejection of the approach adopted by Lord Hoffmann in Attorney General of Belize v Belize Telecom Ltd which characterised the implication of a term in fact as a process of contractual interpretation. What may be of interest to practitioners and academics of common law jurisdictions wrestling with the implications of the Belize approach is the Court of Appeal’s prescription of ‘a three-step process’ for the implication of terms in fact, which is accompanied by an in-depth discussion of various conceptual …

Order On Nov. 14, 2013 Hearing (United Community Bank), John J. Goger

Superior Court of Fulton County: Metro Atlanta Business Case Division Opinions

No abstract provided.

Order On Nov. 1, 2013 Hearing (Michael D. Sullivan), Elizabeth E. Long

Superior Court of Fulton County: Metro Atlanta Business Case Division Opinions

No abstract provided.

Safecom, Ltd. V. Raviv, Yoram Danziger, Zvi Zylbertal, Elyakim Rubinstein

Translated Opinions

Facts: An appeal against the Haifa District Court's judgment dismissing the Appellants' claim against the Respondent for the infringement of its copyright in technical drawings. At trial, the Appellants argued that drawings used by the Respondent for the registration of a patent in the USA for a voltage backup system for cable systems (a product that competes with a product of the first Appellant (hereinafter referred to as "Safecom") infringe Safecom's copyright in the drawings of its products. There is no dispute that there was a previous business relationship between the Respondent and the Appellants, and the Respondent had access …

Not What, But When Is An Offer: Rehabilitating The Rolling Contract, Colin P. Marks

Faculty Works

A number of courts have held that a contract is formed when deferred terms found inside the package are reviewed by the buyer and accepted by some act—usually use of the good. This “rolling” contract approach has been widely criticized by commentators as an abomination of contract law that ignores a true application of the U.C.C., as well as the spirit of that code. However, the approach is not without its allure, as it permits contracts to be formed in an efficient manner that may very well appeal to consumers. Yet too strict of an adherence to the approach threatens …