A smart contract is an agreement enforced by blockchain technology. It supposedly allows the parties involved to conduct transactions more efficiently than a traditional contract, which is based on legal (costly) enforcement. This chapter challenges this claim. Given the need for an...

In at least two decisions the New Zealand Court of Appeal has countenanced that the common law, independently of any express or implied statutory rule, might require a party to contract with someone it does not want to. These cases involved private sporting bodies, but the supposed principle...

Economic analysis suggests that the hesitation to contractualize marriage creates a number of inefficiencies. This paper discusses these inefficiencies and then proposes an economic reconceptualization of Continental marriage law. By bringing in more contract into the statutes regulating...

The term “liberty of contract” is usually associated with the doctrine that the due process clause of the United States Constitution prohibits or should prohibit the State from regulating contracts between private individuals. Many libertarians and free-market advocates embrace the liberty...

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...

The defendant's breach of contract may lead the claimant to compromise a claim by, or against, a third party. Biggin & Co Ltd v Permanite Ltd is the root of modern authority on the recovery of damages for losses under settlements. The theme developed in this article is that later cases have not...

Contracts serve an important function: allocation of risks. In achieving this function, contractual parties routinely include a force majeure clause in their contracts to be excused from performance in the face of a supervening event. But what events qualify to excuse performance and how have...

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...

Conflicts between purchaser and contractor are a major problem in infrastructure development. Consequences of conflicts are massive cost overruns and delay. For this reason, the construction sector makes increasing use of project alliancing, one of the modern frameworks of delivery of complex...