Like property, contractual boilerplate is less tailored to its contractual and business environment than one might expect considering only the costs of producing it. Boilerplate, like all legal communication, requires actors to trade off the benefits of information-richness with the need for...

The contractual, single-exchange framework in Coase (1960) contains the implicit assumption that exchange in property rights does not affect future transaction (i.e., trading) costs. This is pertinent for analyzing use externalities but limits our understanding of property institutions: a...

The conventional wisdom is that property rules induce more (and more efficient) contracting, and that when faced with rigid property rules, intellectual property owners will contract into more flexible liability rules. A series of recent, private copyright deals show some intellectual property...

Market interactions are brought about by the interplay of entitlements and obligations. Entitlements are rights, as perceived by the individuals. They are subjectively perceived rights that go along with a motivational disposition to defend them. Obligations are the counterparts of entitlements....

The assertion that a 'license' is simply a 'contract not to sue' has become a commonplace in both copyright and patent law. I argue that this notion is conceptually flawed, and has become a straightjacket channeling juristic reasoning into unproductive channels. At root, a license is not a...

This Article argues that lawmakers ought to recategorize inheritance law and contracts law as cognate bodies of doctrine within a larger genus of transfers law. The Article proceeds to examine comparatively the justifications for freedom of contracts and freedom of testation, concluding that...

This essay studies the availability of market-based damages for breach of contract as a substitute for standard expectation damages in the law of international sales. It focuses on two major contractual regimes: the UN convention on Contracts for the International Sales of Goods, 1980 (CISG) and...

Racial residential segregation is a crucial aspect of the persisting racial inequality in the United States. We reexamine this enduring problem from a novel perspective, exposing the relationship between segregation and contract duration. In the housing context, the main contract duration...

In line with the widely applied principle of just deserts, we assume that the severity of the penalty on a contract offender increases in the harm on the other. When this principle holds, the influence of the efficiency of the agreement on the incentives to abide by it crucially depends on...

This paper discusses the literature on the enforcement of incomplete contracts. It compares legal enforcement to enforcement via relationships and reputations. A number of mechanisms, such as the repeat purchase mechanism (Klein and Leffler (1981)) and efficiency wages (Shapiro and Stiglitz...