Category Archives: Contract
Kenneth Abraham, ‘The Legal Architecture of Insurance’
ABSTRACT This Article examines the legal ‘architecture’ of insurance. Insurance policies embody the architecture of insurance. They are its blueprints. Consequently, the Article begins with the history of insurance in the United States, which leads to the single most important feature of insurance architecture: the standardization of coverage, especially in property-casualty insurance. The Article next […]
Dharmapala and Garoupa, ‘The Law of Restitution for Void Contracts: An Economic Analysis’
ABSTRACT This paper develops an economic analysis of the application of the law of restitution to the case of void contracts, when agreements may be unenforceable due to legal invalidity. It develops a simple model in which contracting parties’ agreements potentially impose external harms. The analysis focuses on how alternative restitution regimes affect contracting incentives […]
‘A corn Odyssey: questions about force majeure’
A dispute over a ship stranded in the Black Sea raised two interesting points on force majeure: the meaning of ‘unforeseeable’ and whether a notice requirement was a condition precedent. Inerco agreed to sell Ukrainian corn to ADM Israel, due to be shipped between April and May 2023. A force majeure clause dealing with ‘prevention […]
West, Laster and Gulati, ‘The Dragon Who Wasn’t’
ABSTRACT Section 205 of the Restatement (Second) of Contracts declares that every contract imposes a duty on the parties to act in good faith toward and deal fairly with their counterparties. Over the past forty-five years, courts in most states have accepted that declaration as black-letter law, yet have never clearly articulated what the duty […]
Jose Gonzalez, ‘Moving Targets: Promissory Instability in the Pricing and Access Terms of Generative AI Subscription Services (2024-2026)’
ABSTRACT Between October 2024 and July 2026, the leading commercial providers of generative artificial intelligence repeatedly modified the pricing, usage limits, and access terms of subscription services after consumers had already paid for them. This paper documents that pattern through a rapid multiple-case documentary analysis of four providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Moonshot AI), drawing […]
Güzide Irem Can, ‘Why Contracts Need a Holistic Approach to Sustainability?’
ABSTRACT The concept of sustainability – which has become central to today’s legal and economic systems – is being transformed from a broad social, ecological and business-related concern into a binding legal principle that concerns and affects both public and private law. In other words, sustainability is also being transformed into a binding legal paradigm […]
Rebecca Stone, ‘Democratic Defaults’
ABSTRACT Prominent analyses of contractual default rules are ex ante in orientation. According to economic accounts, default rules, like the rules of contract interpretation, should be designed to further the substantive objective of social welfare maximization either by filling gaps with terms that maximize the parties’ joint welfare or by giving parties incentives to write […]
‘When Marriage goes Wrong: Breach of Promise in Fifteenth-Century England’
Historians of marriage have done much to redeem the ‘institution’ for medieval England in the past thirty years. Where once it was assumed that all marriages were loveless business arrangements, dominated by financial considerations, and imposed on daughters against their will, now, especially thanks to historians like Shannon McSheffrey, a much more complicated and nuanced […]
Enrico Baffi, ‘Voluntary but Voidable? Consent, Coercion, and the Limits of Contractual Freedom’
ABSTRACT This Article examines the treatment, across several legal systems, of promises obtained through pressure – in cases of duress and of the exploitation of a state of necessity – and asks to what extent that treatment can be understood as designed to promote economic efficiency. As an operational tool, it proposes the criterion of […]
John Linarelli, ‘Theorizing a Transnational Contract Law: What Role for the CISG?’
ABSTRACT This article investigates whether a coherent transnational contract law can be said to exist and examines the role of the Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (‘CISG’) within this framework. It begins by identifying five prominent cross-border contracting practices: isolated commercial transactions, trade association contracts, supply chain governance, sovereign debt, and […]