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Full-Text Articles in Law and Economics
After Frustration: Three Cheers For Chandler V. Webster, Victor P. Goldberg
After Frustration: Three Cheers For Chandler V. Webster, Victor P. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
Performance of a contract can be excused by a number of circumstances, notably impossibility, impracticability, and frustration. When performance is excused there remains the question of how to treat any payments or expenditures that were made prior to the occurrence of the contract-frustrating event. In Chandler v. Webster, the English courts decided over a century ago that the parties should be left where they were at the time of the frustrating event. Forty years later that holding was overturned so that now recovery might be had both for restitution of payments made prior to the event and for expenditures …
Traynor (Drennan) Versus Hand (Baird): Much Ado About (Almost) Nothing, Victor P. Goldberg
Traynor (Drennan) Versus Hand (Baird): Much Ado About (Almost) Nothing, Victor P. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
Most Contracts casebooks feature either Baird v. Gimbel or Drennan v. Star Paving to illustrate the limits on revocability of an offer. In this article an analysis of the case law yields three major conclusions. First, as is generally known, in the contractor-subcontractor cases Drennan has prevailed. However, both it and its spawn, Restatement 2d E 87(2), have had almost no impact outside that narrow area. Moreover, almost all the cases involve public construction projects – private projects account for only about ten percent of the cases. This suggests that private parties have managed to resolve the problem contractually. Public …