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Full-Text Articles in Law and Economics
Obsolescence: The Intractable Production Problem In Contract Law, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott
Obsolescence: The Intractable Production Problem In Contract Law, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
Contract law has long suffered from an institutional problem: Which legal institution can best create an efficient law for commercial contracts that can overcome "obsolescence” – the persistence of rules that only solve yesterday’s contracting problems? Until the early 20th century, contract law was largely created by common law courts. The law's default rules were efficient when created and courts updated them as commerce changed. But there were few rules and the common law process is slow. In response, the 20th century saw public and private lawmaking bodies enact commercial statutes in discrete legal areas such as secured credit, commercial …
Contracting Out Of The Fiduciary Duty Of Loyalty: An Empirical Analysis Of Corporate Opportunity Waivers, Gabriel Rauterberg, Eric L. Talley
Contracting Out Of The Fiduciary Duty Of Loyalty: An Empirical Analysis Of Corporate Opportunity Waivers, Gabriel Rauterberg, Eric L. Talley
Faculty Scholarship
For centuries, the duty of loyalty has been the hallowed centerpiece of fiduciary obligation, widely considered one of the few “mandatory” rules of corporate law. That view, however, is no longer true. Beginning in 2000, Delaware dramatically departed from tradition by granting incorporated entities a statutory right to waive a crucial part of the duty of loyalty: the corporate opportunities doctrine. Other states have since followed Delaware’s lead, similarly permitting firms to execute “corporate opportunity waivers.” Surprisingly, more than fifteen years into this reform experiment, no study has attempted to either systematically measure the corporate response to these reforms or …
Protecting Reliance, Victor P. Goldberg
Protecting Reliance, Victor P. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
Reliance plays a central role in contract law and scholarship. One party relies on the other's promised performance, its statements, or its anticipated entry into a formal agreement. Saying that reliance is important, however, says nothing about what we should do about it. The focus of this Essay is on the many ways that parties choose to protect reliance. The relationship between what parties do and what contract doctrine cares about is tenuous at best. Contract performance takes place over time, and the nature of the parties 'future obligations can be deferred to take into account changing circumstances. Reliance matters …
Market Damages, Efficient Contracting, And The Economic Waste Fallacy, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott
Market Damages, Efficient Contracting, And The Economic Waste Fallacy, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
Market damages are the best default rule when parties trade in thick markets: They induce parties to contract efficiently and to trade if and only if trade is efficient, and they do not create ex ante inefficiencies. Courts commonly overlook these virtues, however, when promisors bundle services that are not separately priced. For example, a promisor may agree to pay royalties on a mining lease and later to restore the promisee's property. When the cost of completion is large relative to the "market delta " – the increase in market value – courts concerned with avoiding "economic waste" limit the …
The Economics Of Form And Substance In Contract Interpretation, Avery W. Katz
The Economics Of Form And Substance In Contract Interpretation, Avery W. Katz
Faculty Scholarship
For over a century, legal commentators have debated the relative merits of formal and substantive approaches to the interpretation of contracts; in recent years, the debate has increasingly been conducted in the language of the economic approach to contract law. While this new wave of scholarship has been relatively successful in relating the traditional debates over formalism to specific transactional and institutional problems such as imperfect information, it has been less productive in terms of generating useful legal or policy recommendations. This Essay proposes a different approach: one that focuses on private rather than public legal decisionmakers as its primary …