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Full-Text Articles in Law and Economics
Efficient Breach, Gregory Klass
Efficient Breach, Gregory Klass
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The theory of efficient breach is the best known, and the most controversial, product of nearly half a century of economic analysis of contract law. In its simplest form, which is the one that dominates the legal imagination, the theory argues that expectation damages are good because they allow, even encourage, a party to breach when performance becomes inefficient, thereby increasing social welfare. Many noneconomists assume the theory is well supported by principles of neoclassical economics. Thus critics commonly focus on the theory’s moral failings, or on problems with the neoclassical approach more generally. But today no economic thinker defends …
Penalty Default Licenses: A Case For Uncertainty, Kristelia A. García
Penalty Default Licenses: A Case For Uncertainty, Kristelia A. García
Publications
Research on the statutory license for certain types of copyright-protected content has revealed an unlikely symbiosis between uncertainty and efficiency. Contrary to received wisdom, which tells us that in order to increase efficiency, we must increase stability, this Article suggests that uncertainty can actually be used to increase efficiency in the marketplace. In the music industry, the battle over terrestrial performance rights--that is, the right of a copyright holder to collect royalties for plays of a sound recording on terrestrial radio--has raged for decades. In June 2012, in a deal that circumvented the statutory license for sound recordings for the …