Category Archives: Interpretation
‘In Support of Teaching Legislation and Legislative Interpretation as a Discrete Subject’
1. MY PATH TO TEACHING LEGISLATION When I started lecturing more years ago than I care to remember, I was asked what subjects I would be interested in teaching. Among other things, I volunteered to teach on the course on ‘legal system and legal method’, and particularly to teach legislative interpretation. This met with some […]
Roddy Cairns, ‘Implied contract terms: what if The Moorcock had been decided in Scotland?’
INTRODUCTION – WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THE MOORCOCK? This article is adapted from a paper given at the University of Strathclyde Law School’s Scotify! event on 3 September 2025. The brief from the organiser of the event was to take a recent case from furth of the jurisdiction and apply the principles of Scots […]
Yeqing Xu, ‘A Corpus-Based Analysis of ChatGPT English Translation of Terms in the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China (Contract) from the Perspective of Functional Theories of Translation’
ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence technology has posed significant challenges to legal translation. However, few scholars have analyzed the performance of artificial intelligence in the translation of terms. By constructing a corpus of the terms in the ChatGPT-generated text of the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China (Contract), the paper analyzes the performance of ChatGPT […]
Stephen Bainbridge, ‘Merger Agreement Anomalies: A Case Study in Incomplete Contracts’
ABSTRACT This article uses the ABA’s Private Target Mergers and Acquisitions Deal Points Study to interrogate a puzzle that I initially took for evidence of bad lawyering: the persistent presence of undefined or unaddressed terms in sophisticated acquisition agreements. Post-closing purchase price adjustments, representation and warranty insurance exclusivity, exclusive remedy provisions, and – most strikingly […]
Miklós Király, ‘The development of rules of interpretation in uniform sales laws’
ABSTRACT This study reviews and compares different sources of uniform substantive law on international sales and contracts, providing an overview of the methods developed to interpret them over the past nine decades. This historical approach helps us to understand the challenges of interpretation. Have uniform law instruments established a common solution for interpreting them? Have […]
Radu Bogdan Bobei, ‘The interpretation of transnational law: an approach’
ABSTRACT Transnational law and its areas should not and cannot be treated in isolation, or at least not in absolute isolation, from public international law and the technique of conflict of laws. The concept of interpretation connects the above-mentioned three disciplines, both through process and through concept. This article explores how interpretation, through the so-called […]
‘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 […]
Choi, Gulati and Ball, ‘The Sound of Silence’
ABSTRACT Standard contract theory assumes that sophisticated drafters read formal judicial opinions and revise agreements accordingly. This Essay challenges that model by demonstrating how informal judicial signaling shapes contract production and the reliance on default rules through contractual silence. Using mergers and acquisitions (M&A) sandbagging provisions as a case study, we examine why contractual silence […]
Elias Neibart, ‘Lawyer’s Meaning is Lawful Meaning’
ABSTRACT Many textualists think that, when we interpret texts, our goal is to uncover their ‘ordinary meaning’. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of a ‘reasonable person’ at the time of a text’s enactment and understand the words on the page as they would have. To be sure, textualists say that we should […]
Hoffman and Arbel, ‘Generative Gap Filling’
ABSTRACT Contract law polices a line between interpretation, the recovery of meaning a text already holds, and gap filling, the supply of terms the text lacks. The boundary rests on an unchecked premise: that courts need to fill gaps themselves because the document has run out of meaning. We tested it. Borrowing a masking design […]