Contracts Commons^™

Legal Regulation Of Twenty-First-Century Families, Marsha Garrison, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

This post includes the table of contents, introduction and our comment as the editors of an interdisciplinary volume that explores the implications for law and policy of changes in marriage and family over the past half century. The volume includes chapters by leading social science researchers and family law scholars whose work focuses on these matters. The book captures the complexity of debates about the regulation of marriage and families and the best policy paths forward, through contributions by authors with widely varying perspectives. But it also aims to inform these debates by situating them in a framework grounded in …

Corporate Control And Credible Commitment, Ronald J. Gilson, Alan Schwartz

Faculty Scholarship

The separation of control and ownership – the ability of a small group effectively to control a company though holding a minority of its cash flow rights – is common throughout the world, but also is commonly decried. The control group, it is thought, will use its position to consume excessive amounts of project returns, and this injures minority shareholders in two ways: there is less money and the controllers are not maximizing firm value. To the contrary, we argue here that there is an optimal share of the firm that compensates the control group for monitoring managers and otherwise …

The Measure Of A Mac: A Quasi-Experimental Protocol For Tokenizing Force Majeure Clauses In M&A; Agreements, Eric L. Talley, Drew O'Kane

Faculty Scholarship

This paper develops a protocol for using a familiar data set on force majeure provisions in corporate acquisitions agreements to tokenize and calibrate a machine-learning algorithm of textual analysis. Our protocol, built on regular expression (RE) and latent semantic analysis (LSA) approaches, serves to replicate, correct, and extend the hand-coded data. Our preliminary results indicate that both approaches perform well, though a hybridized approach improves predictive power further. Monte Carlo simulations suggest that our results are generally robust to out-of-sample predictions. We conclude that similar approaches could be used more broadly in empirical legal scholarship, especially including in business law.

Bargaining For Motherhood: Postadoption Visitation Agreements, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is about the use of contract in family formation. More specifically, I want to look at how contract is now used by parents in the process of acquiring children and, as we shall see, also as a means of retaining interests in those same children under the developing regime of open adoption.

Reforming Derivative Taxation, Alex Raskolnikov

Faculty Scholarship

This brief essay outlines three benchmarks for evaluating alternative ways of taxing capital income, summarizes anticipatory, retroactive, and accrual-based proposals for reforming the taxation of derivatives, and offers guidelines for evaluating more limited reforms. It is intended as an introduction to key concepts, tensions, and ideas for reforming the taxation of financial instruments.

Overbilling And Informed Financial Consent — A Contractual Solution, Barak D. Richman, Mark A. Hall, Kevin A. Schulman

Faculty Scholarship

U.S. hospitals and physicians regularly charge uninsured patients and patients receiving care outside their health-plan networks far more what most health insurers pay and far more than their actual costs. Such practices have triggered over 100 lawsuits and prompted calls for pricing transparency in Congress and price regulation in several states. This Perspective argues that the theory of implied contracts, a foundation in most first-year courses in contract law, offers a useful legal and ethical mechanism for handling these troubling problems in health care billing.

The Hierarchy That Wasn’T There: Elevating “Usage” To Its Rightful Position For Contracts Governed By The Cisg, William P. Johnson

All Faculty Scholarship

Under domestic U.S. sales law, usage of trade is relevant in ascertaining the meaning of an agreement, and it can be used to supplement, qualify, or explain an agreement. However, usage of trade may not be used under domestic U.S. sales law to contradict a written agreement. Moreover, any course of performance or course of dealing between the parties will prevail over inconsistent usage of trade. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, or CISG, similarly provides for consideration of usage to establish the terms of the agreement between the parties, as well as to …

Chain-Link Confidentiality, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Disclosing personal information online often feels like losing control over one’s data forever; but this loss is not inevitable. This essay proposes a “chain-link confidentiality” approach to protecting online privacy. One of the most difficult challenges to guarding privacy in the digital age is the protection of information once it is exposed to other people. A chain-link confidentiality regime would contractually link the disclosure of personal information to obligations to protect that information as the information moves downstream. The system would focus on the relationships not only between the discloser of information and the initial recipient, but also between the …

Private Regulation Of Consumer Arbitration, Christopher R. Drahozal, Samantha Zyontz

Faculty Scholarship

Arbitration providers, such as the American Arbitration Association ("AAA') and JAMS, have promulgated due process protocols to regulate the fairness of consumer and employment arbitration agreements. A common criticism of these due process protocols, however, has been that they lack an enforcement mechanism. While arbitration providers state that they enforce the protocols by refusing to administer cases in which the arbitration agreement materially fails to comply with the relevant protocol, the private nature of arbitral dispute resolution makes it difficult to verify whether providers in fact refuse to administer such cases.

This Article reports the results of the first empirical …

Contract Law Walks The Plank: Carnival Cruise Lines V. Shute, Charles L. Knapp

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Measuring, Monitoring, Reporting, And Verifying (Mmrv): Negotiating Trust In Transnational Contracts For Redd,, David Takacs

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Summary Of Fourth St. Place V. Travelers Indem. Co., 127 Nev. Adv. Op. 86, Daniella Labounty

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court reviewed a district court grant of summary judgment in favor of the insurer in an insurance coverage action.

Creditors' Contempt, Lea Shepard

BYU Law Review

This Article takes a fresh look at the power of courts and creditors to force debtors to repay their obligations through in personam collection techniques. Variously known as “debtor’s examinations,” “turnover orders,” “citations to discover assets,” “supplementary proceedings,” “proceedings supplementary,” and “proceedings in aid of execution,” in personam remedies force the debtor, under threat of the court’s contempt authority, to turn over money or property directly to a creditor. Because the exercise of the court’s contempt authority can result in a debtor’s imprisonment, in personam techniques have long been regarded as a critical but potentially very coercive arrow in a …

The Diminishing Returns Of Incentive Pay In Executive Compensation Contracts, Gregg D. Polsky, Andrew Lund

Scholarly Works

For the past 30 years, the conventional wisdom has been that executive compensation packages should include very large proportions of incentive pay. This incentive pay orthodoxy has become so firmly entrenched that the current debates about executive compensation simply take it as a given. We argue, however, that in light of evolving corporate governance mechanisms, the marginal net benefit of incentive-laden pay packages is both smaller than appreciated and getting smaller over time. As a result, the assumption that higher proportions of incentive pay are beneficial is no longer warranted.

A number of corporate governance mechanisms have evolved to duplicate …

Cross-Cultural Readings Of Intent: Form, Fiction, And Reasonable Expectations, Deborah Waire Post

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Wills, Trusts, And Estates, J. William Gray Jr., Katherine E. Ramsey

University of Richmond Law Review

The 2011 session of the Virginia General Assembly enacted wills, trusts, and estates legislation that: (i) eliminated a potential federal transfer tax trap in inter vivos marital trusts, (ii) interpreted transfer tax formula clauses in light of recent changes in federal law, and (iii) adopted the Uniform Adult Guardianship and Protective Proceedings Jurisdiction Act. Three other legislative enactments and seven opinions of the Supreme Court of Virginia during the twelve months ending June 1, 2011, addressed issues affecting this field. In addition to addressing those developments, this article summarizes a recent federal district court opinion that dealt with a significant …

Contracting For Procedure, Kevin E. Davis, Helen Hershkoff

William & Mary Law Review

Judicial decisions of public courts increasingly are based on “contract procedure,” private rules of procedure that the parties draft and assent to before a dispute even has arisen. These rules govern such matters as the forum in which the proceeding will be conducted, whether a jury will be involved in adjudicating the dispute, the scope of rights of discovery, and rules of evidence. The practice deserves greater attention and should raise more profound concerns than the academic literature currently suggests. We argue that contract procedure operates as a form of privatization that effectively outsources government functions to private contracting parties. …

Efficient Breach Of International Law: Optimal Remedies, 'Legalized Noncompliance,' And Related Issues, Eric A. Posner, Alan O. Sykes

Michigan Law Review

In much of the scholarly literature on international law, there is a tendency to condemn violations of the law and to leave it at that. If all violations of international law were indeed undesirable, this tendency would be unobjectionable. We argue in this Article, however that a variety of circumstances arise under which violations of international law are desirable from an economic standpoint. The reasons why are much the same as the reasons why nonperformance of private contracts is sometimes desirable- the concept of "efficient breach," familiar to modern students of contract law, has direct applicability to international law. As …

Summary Of Pacificare Of Nev., Inc. V. Rogers, 127 Nev. Adv. Op. 71, Jason Deforest

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

An appeal from a district court order denying a motion to compel arbitration in a tort and contract action.

Derivatives: A Twenty-First Century Understanding, Timothy E. Lynch

Faculty Works

Derivatives are commonly defined as some variation of the following: a financial instrument whose value is derived from the performance of a secondary source such as an underlying bond, commodity or index. But this definition is both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. Thus, not surprisingly, derivatives are largely misunderstood, including by many policy makers, regulators and legal analysts. It is important for interested parties such as policy makers to understand derivatives, because the types and uses of derivatives have exploded in the last few decades, and because these financial instruments can provide both social benefits and cause social harms. This Article presents …