Naidu and Yuchtman (2013) find that labor demand shocks in 19th-century Britain had an impact on master and servant prosecutions, as breaking an employee contract was a criminal offense until 1875. We first reproduce all regression tables in Naidu and Yuchtman (2013) and then test for robustness...

Rational parties enter into a contract if the agreement is mutually beneficial. However, after the contract is formed, changes to the costs and/or benefits of performance may render the original contract undesirable. In this paper, we carry out an incentivized experiment to study the effect of...

Targeted financial sanctions are routinely used to combat financial crime. As they are endorsed by the United Nations and the Financial Action Task Force, the vast majority of jurisdictions have established regulatory frameworks that make provision for targeted financial sanctions. These...

COVID-19 pandemic has multiple consequences and knocked multiple disciplines after its occurrence throughout the globe. Among the disciplines touched by the pandemic is the role of law presented as an excuse for the responsibility of non-performance of owing to the pandemic. The COVID-19...

This Article makes two original contributions to the contract interpretation and renegotiation literatures. First, we introduce an under-explored cause of renegotiation failure: party uncertainty regarding the type of court that will interpret their contract. Parties may predict differently how...

Contract law affects behavior not just directly, by ordering damages, but also indirectly, by providing information on how the parties to the dispute behaved. Information from litigation can then help third parties decide whether to do business with the disputants going forward. Contract law...

This chapter examines the often-cited distinction between private international law and public international law in the context of the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (‘CISG’). The traditional view holds that private and public international law are separate...

Blockchain technology can autonomously perform transactions across various industries and sectors without human involvement, revolutionizing how people do business. These transactions are performed through smart contracts, which consist of coded commands on the blockchain. This paper looks at...

This Article examines the latest international uniform law initiative on the creation of an International Sales Law for Europe, namely the Common European Sales Law (CESL). It comprises four parts, which correspond to the most complex and important aspects of the project’s novel legal response...

In nowaday’s international trade, the contracting parties often come from a different linguistic background. As a consequence, the use of foreign languages in contractual relationships raises many issues the implications of which are often underestimated. They are thereby analysed in a...

This study - commissioned by the Policy Department C at the request of the Committee on Legal Affairs - aims at discussing the reasons why the law chosen in commercial contracts is largely non-European and non-member state law. To do so, it first provides an overview of the relevant academic and...

The separability of an arbitration agreement from the underlying contract is a well-established theory in commercial arbitration. This theory has been applied by courts and arbitral tribunal across the globe without any deviance. However, the position becomes complex when the question is...

Contractors have become a ubiquitous presence in the administrative state. How these private sector entities intersect with the rulemaking process, however, is not well understood. Unpacking contractors’ role in rulemaking is important, not least because rulemaking is the executive branch’s...

This Paper makes three main contributions. First, this Paper surveys Algorand Smart Contracts and the Algorand Network, including software systems and algorithmic architectures. Second, this Paper discusses various software mechanisms enabling developers to execute transfers on the Algorand...

CEO contractual protection, in forms of CEO employment agreements and CEO severance pay agreements, is prevalent among S&P 1500 firms. While prior research has examined the impact of these agreements on corporate decisions from shareholders’ perspective, there is little research on the impact...

This paper focuses on one particular form of intermediary which has emerged as a core component of the digital economy: platforms. Platforms are the beating heart of the digital world, bringing together those who provide and those who acquire: on social media, people share their lives with their...

Why do lawyers in some jurisdictions continue to ‘automatically’ exclude the 1980 UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) in their choices of law for international sales contracts? Why do lawyers in other jurisdictions approach the decision very differently? Why...

This article develops the point that the problems associated with contractual holdup may justify legal intervention in theory, and the article relates this conclusion to legal intervention in practice. Contractual holdup is considered for both fresh contracts and for modifications of contracts....

Natural resources such as carbon, water, and fish are increasingly managed with markets that require an initial allocation of property rights. In practice these rights are typically grandfathered based on historical use, but rights could be allocated any number of ways. Taking the perspective of...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a current buzzword. It describes the network of physical devices of any kind (cars, TV sets, watches, garments, food packaging, etc.), which are embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity to enable them (i) to collect and exchange data...

In Atlantic Marine Construction Company v. United States District Court, the Supreme Court held that a “contractually valid” forum selection clause should be enforced by federal courts absent extraordinary circumstances. Unfortunately, the Court provided no guidance on how to assess whether...

Modification of public contracts is largely unresearched and underappreciated. It is one of the major grey areas in EU and national public procurement law. Reason is that it forms part of post-award transparency—an area that has flown under the radar for many years. Regulatory and political...

We introduce the contraction rule for updating ambiguous beliefs. With the rule, a realized event renders an individual’s belief unambiguous when and only when the event has small ambiguity. The contraction rule is continuous and insensitive to priors that are less likely given the...

The paper examines the architecture of contracting and the instruments to control the exercise and the abuse of private regulatory power along supply chains. The design of the contractual architecture and its implementation may cause significant unfairness in power distribution that can...

This chapter explores the extent to which Australian contract law has - or has not - reflected international contract law in its development. The author explores the areas in which Australian courts and legislators might benefit from drawing upon the CISG and the UNIDROIT Principles of...

When discussing the fairness of boilerplate consumer contracts, courts often rely on the criterion of symmetry: whether a given contractual provision applies equally to both parties. In many states, boilerplate provisions that apply solely to the consumer but not to the merchant are much more...

The new law of contractual discretion is developing apace. This article addresses three major issues in this dynamic field. First, the article propounds an analytical framework for understanding the nature and practice of reasonableness review in the contractual setting, based on doctrinal...

Contract law has one overarching goal: to advance the legitimate interests of the contracting parties. For the most part, scholars, judges, and parties embrace this party primacy norm, recognizing only a few exceptions, such as mandatory rules that bar enforcement of agreements that harm others....

A smart contract is software designed to do the job of a legal contract: ensuring the performance of parties who might not otherwise trust one another to do so. By running a smart contract on blockchain, users can lock themselves into future performances without relying on a third-party enforcer...

This essay examines whether the smart contract innovation is capable of displacing the orthodox adherence to traditional contracts. This examination is underpinned by an analysis of the legality of smart contracts in which it is exemplified that smart contracts ought to be considered legally...

This note explores the interactions between new technologies with key areas of commercial law and potential legal changes to respond to new developments in technology and businesses. Inspired by the Bali Fintech Agenda, this note argues that country authorities need to closely examine the...

We provide a quantitative macrohistory of the evolution and coevolution of three fundamental elements of English caselaw: property, contract, and procedure. Our dataset is derived from a comprehensive corpus of reports on pre-1765 English court cases. Leveraging existing topic model estimates,...

The contribution aims to address the issues implied by the following questions: (a) What is the contract law to be codified? (b) What is the possible impact of a European contract law codification upon the other private law fields? (c) Which are the driving forces behind and ahead of the...