Category Archives: Contract
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 […]
Jennifer Nadler, ‘Consideration and Its Problems: A Re-Interpretation’
INTRODUCTION The idea that an enforceable contract requires consideration – a promise in exchange for a promise or for a completed act or forbearance – has been referred to as ‘one of the most basic propositions of contract doctrine’. Ibbetson argues that contract law’s focus on relationships of reciprocity is visible by the year 1300, […]
Sadie Blanchard, ‘Contracting for Equity’
ABSTRACT Modern contract theory often treats equity as a defect of contract doctrine because it supposedly undermines party intent. Discretionary, ex post scrutiny of contracts is said to frustrate ex-ante planning and reduce contractual value. Theorists point to the hyperformalist contracting practices of particular groups as models to which general contract law should conform. Inaccurate […]
Sabine Tsuruda, ‘Workplace Authority and the Duty to Bargain’
ABSTRACT Collective bargaining law has a neglected but morally essential role to play in employment. Each person possesses fundamental and equal moral authority over what to do with their bodies, how to think, and what kind of projects and life to pursue, and that authority is directly implicated by employment. Collective bargaining law has the […]
Siyi Lin, ‘The Illusory Problem of Intention in Algorithmic Contracts’
ABSTRACT Every day, millions of agreements are automatically concluded across diverse industries, with algorithms making decisions and determining contractual terms, such as price, quality and quantity, and selecting counterparties. However, traditional contract law is based on the assumption that transactions were necessarily made between humans. Although algorithmic contracting has become an integral part of contemporary […]