Monthly Archives: April, 2025
Tom Kohavi, ‘Policy and Relationality in Tort Law: Contractualist Foundations’
ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between relationality and policy in tort law from an evolutionary perspective. While, as part of the regulatory system, tort law must evolve in response to structural and allocative policy concerns, its ability to do so is limited by the relational normative structure through which it operates and claims moral […]
Luppi and Parisi, ‘The Economics of Evolutionary Programming’
ABSTRACT In this paper, we present an economic model of evolutionary computation technologies, highlighting how alternative propertization and liability mechanisms shape the balance between ‘exploration’ and ‘exploitation’ in evolutionary research. We consider two interrelated effects of evolutionary experimentation: (i) the positive externalities that occur when superior mutations enhance performance, benefitting all subsequent implementations of the […]
Chen Zhu, ‘Copyleft Reconsidered: Why Software Licensing Jurisprudence Needs Insights from Relational Contract Theory’
ABSTRACT This article calls for a re-examination from a Relational Contract Theory perspective, of the copyleft agreement, which mandates the source code of publicly released software to be perpetually shared with the public. It deals with standard-form copyleft licences such as the GNU General Public Licence, whose legal enforceability has often been a subject of […]
Landsman, Lyandres, Maydew and Rabetti, ‘Auditing Smart Contracts’
ABSTRACT We study the emerging market for audits of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) smart contracts. We examine two questions. First, what factors influence DeFi protocol developers’ decisions to audit their smart contracts and their choice of auditors? Second, is having an audit associated with better outcomes post protocol launch, such as attracting more funds or reducing […]
Adam Hirsch, ‘Will as Thing’
ABSTRACT Properly viewed, wills are two things in one: they are tangible objects and bundles of rights. Scholars have long contemplated property and contract from this dual perspective. Thus far, no one has examined wills through the same bifocal lens. This Article endeavors to do so. It argues that the physicality of wills has often […]
James Toomey, ‘Fiduciary Standards’
ABSTRACT ‘Fiduciary’ law is, notoriously, all over the place. Many doubt it hangs together—that anything beyond the label ‘fiduciary’ unites corporate directors and physicians. Others offer theories of the conditions under which the law refers to a relationship as ‘fiduciary’ – to compensate for power dynamics, where legal power is exercised for another, in money […]
James Toomey, ‘Privately-Crafted Obligations’
ABSTRACT Contract law, we are often told, enforces ‘promises’ – a concept from ordinary social life. Notwithstanding its ubiquity, cracks in this perspective have been showing for a long time – from the doctrine of consideration to contract’s essential multilaterality, contract’s fit with our ordinary understanding of promising doesn’t seem quite right. Less noticed, the […]
Rachel Landy, ‘Swiping Rights’
ABSTRACT While many legal regimes have undergone fundamental shifts to account for the online economy, one lags behind: industry-specific mandatory contract rules. These rules, frequently buried in decades-old, non-intuitive statutes, are often overly prescriptive and come with draconian penalties, hampering the goals of entrepreneurship and impeding startup growth. Much has been written about the intersection […]
‘A New Account of the Whole Picture of Private Law’
Hanoch Dagan and Avihay Dorfman, Relational Justice: A Theory of Private Law (2024). It is not every day that we are presented with a new theory of private law that invites us to see the project of private light in a new way. In a move familiar to philosophers of contract and tort but perhaps […]
David Hoffman, ‘Consumers’ Unreasonable Textual Expectations’
ABSTRACT The Restatement of Consumer Contracts, at § 4(d), states that ‘standard contract terms are interpreted in a manner that effectuates the reasonable expectations of the consumer’. As the Reporters note, this language derives from the Restatement (Second) of Contracts § 211, itself largely pulled from the insurance context. As § 211 was until recently […]