Conventional wisdom portrays contracts as static distillations of parties’ shared intent at some discrete point in time. In reality, however, contract terms evolve in response to their environments, including new laws, legal interpretations, and economic shocks. While several legal scholars...

Transactions in the market for corporate control are not fully standardized but rather exhibit a material amount of variation. This paper explores a possible structural explanation: That the complexity of merger and acquisition (M&A) agreements makes them susceptible to multiple sources of path...

Modern commercial contracts - those governing mergers & acquisitions and financial derivatives, for instance - have become structurally complex and interconnected. Yet contract law largely ignores structural complexity. This Article develops a theory of “contractual structuralism” to explain...

This Article, written for a symposium at Wharton celebrating Ron Gilson's scholarship, assesses Gilson, Sabel & Scott's "braided contracting" thesis, presented in their 2010 article, Braiding: The Interaction of Formal and Informal Contracting in Theory, Practice, and Doctrine. Focusing...

The rise of the network as a form of economic organization renders problematic our standard understanding of how capitalism is governed. As the governance of production shifts from vertical integration to horizontal contract, a puzzle arises: how do contracts, presumed to be susceptible to...

Contract law and the formal models of contract economics assume that agreements are fully customized. On the other hand, recent legal research highlights the role standardized terms play in contract design. Those lines of research overlook an important class of contracts between those extremes....

This essay, prepared for a symposium honoring Chief Justice Leo Strine, explores how institutional capacity limits the Delaware courts’ role in the U.S. economy. A decision theoretic approach is employed to delineate the boundaries of that role, with particular attention paid to recent...

We use social network analysis to shed new light on contractual evolution, using the development of the top-up option in two-step tender offers from 1999 to 2013 as our empirical setting. We find that direct connection to prior adopters of the innovative term is the most important diffusion...

An influential literature in private law argues that the legal system interferes with modern markets’ “private ordering.” Private ordering refers to parties relying upon informal institutions, like social norms and reputational sanctions, to enforce legal obligations. This informal...