Category Archives: Contract
Michael Haley, ‘Licences of commercial property: the Templeman Legacy’
ABSTRACT 40 years ago, Lord Templeman in Street v Mountford fundamentally recast the judicial approach to the lease or licence distinction. The decision allowed him to take centre stage and showcase his formidable personality and interrogative reasoning, while exercising the forensic skills he had acquired as a tax lawyer. Although solely designed to prevent the […]
Ellias and Lalafaryan, ‘The Global Law of Debt’
ABSTRACT Corporate debt financing and the restructuring of large corporations are now governed by what this Article calls the ‘global law of debt’, a transnational system shaped more by law firms, investment banks, and investors in New York and London than by national laws or court decisions. Large companies can now optimize governing law on […]
‘Planning for Bargaining Power’
Albert H Choi and George G Triantis, ‘Designing Contract Modification’, University of Chicago Law Review (forthcoming), available at SSRN (2 February 2025). This article by Professors Choi and Triantis hits close to home with how closely it models my personal experiences with oil and gas leases on my family’s farm during the leasing boom of […]
Kwan Ho Lau, ‘Terms implied by law: to exclude or not to exclude?’
ABSTRACT In 2001, Elisabeth Peden concluded after some study that the process of implication of terms in law was ‘correspondingly vague and lacking in definite principles’. Over two decades later, that characterisation remains accurate. The varied terminology in judicial use reflects an ambiguity over the normative position occupied by terms implied by law. That, in […]
Matthew Baker, ‘Medieval Roots, Modern Insights: The Origins of Common Law Contract’
ABSTRACT Common law contract is described as the body of law dealing with legally enforceable promises, with its basic principles originating from judicial decisions. What underpins this method of lawmaking is an understanding of the past, such that prior judicial decisions guide the resolution of present legal disputes. Yet despite this ostensibly historical process serving […]
Danisz Okulicz, ‘Should Lawyers Lie to Their Clients? Biased Expertise in Negotiations’
ABSTRACT I propose a theoretical model to analyze the effects of cheap-talk legal advice on pretrial negotiations with asymmetric information when a conflict of interest between plaintiffs and attorneys is possible. An informed defendant makes a settlement offer to an uninformed plaintiff who may consult her attorney before taking the decision. Hiring an attorney biased […]
Peter Benson, ‘Some leading themes in the contract scholarship of Stephen Waddams’
ABSTRACT Among the leading themes in Stephen Waddams’s monumental contributions to the development and deeper understanding of modern contract law, this chapter focuses on two of the most fundamental that particularly preoccupied him throughout his career. The first concerns the proper significance and roles of equity and common law after their integration in 1875 in […]
Edward Iacobucci, ‘Trebilcock and trade-offs’
ABSTRACT Through discussion of a sample of his work, this article identifies a key theme in Michael Trebilcock’s astonishingly deep and broad body of scholarship: trade-offs matter. Trebilcock’s analysis of a House of Lords case, Macaulay v Schroeder Publishing, demonstrates the perils of one-sided economic analysis: the court ignored trade-offs in determining that a contract […]
Katy Barnett, ‘The Role of Currency in the Development of Modern Expectation Damages in Contract at Common Law’
ABSTRACT Expectation damages as the default remedy in the modern common law of contract developed relatively late, in the mid to late nineteenth century. This lecture will argue that the presence of a stable and standardised currency was an important precursor to the development, because it allowed the non-breaching party to purchase a substitute performance […]
Elena Alina Onţanu, ‘Relational Self, Harm, and Responsibility – A Contract Law Perspective in Response to the Montesquieu Lecture by Jonathan Herring’
ABSTRACT This paper responds to Professor Jonathan Herring’s Montesquieu Lecture on ‘Criminal Law and the Relational Self: Rethinking Conceptions of Harm and Responsibility in an Interdependent World’ by reflecting on how the tension between individualised and relational conceptions of the self manifests in contract law. While the principle of freedom of contract and party autonomy […]