Contract Law

2
Essay
Pre-closing Liability
Omri Ben-Shahar
Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School

I am grateful to Russell Korobkin, Saul Levmore, and Eric Posner for helpful comments.

2
Book review
75.1
Economics as Context for Contract Law
George S. Geis
Associate Professor of Law, University of Alabama School of Law; Visiting Associate Professor, University of Virginia School of Law, 2007–2008

Thanks to Victor Goldberg, Jody Kraus, Darian Ibrahim, and Eric Posner for helpful comments.

2
Article
78.3
Public Entrenchment through Private Law: Binding Local Governments
Christopher Serkin
Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School

Thanks to Vicki Been for early conversations about this Article. I received invaluable comments from Greg Alexander, Fred Bloom, John Echeverria, Lee Fennell, Ted Janger, Jim Krier, Rebecca Kysar, Eric Posner, Julie Roin, Stew Sterk, Nelson Tebbe, and participants in faculty workshops at Brooklyn Law School and Cornell Law School, as well as participants at the Tel Aviv Environmental Law and Policy Workshop. Thanks to the Brooklyn Law School Dean’s Summer Research Fund for generously supporting this project. Carrie Darman and Amanda Zink provided research assistance.

2
Article
80.1
The Psychology of Contract Precautions
David A. Hoffman
James E. Beasley Professor of Law, Temple University Beasley School of Law
Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
Assistant Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School

We thank Jane Baron, Craig Green, Zev Eigen, Yuval Feldman, Bob Hillman, Greg Mandel, Rafael Pardo, Alex Radus, Brishen Rogers, David Zaring, and participants at faculty colloquia at Vanderbilt Law School, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, William & Mary Law School, as well as at the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies for comments on earlier drafts.

2
Essay
84.1
Concepts before Percepts: The Central Place of Doctrine in Legal Scholarship
Richard A. Epstein
Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, New York University School of Law; Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution; James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Law and Senior Lecturer, The University of Chicago Law School

My thanks to Bijan Aboutorabi, The University of Chicago Law School Class of 2018, and Philip Cooper, The University of Chicago Law School Class of 2017, for their valuable research assistance.

Print
Essay
84.1
Searching for the Common Law: The Quantitative Approach of the Restatement of Consumer Contracts
Oren Bar-Gill
William J. Friedman and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor of Law and Economics, Harvard Law School

For helpful comments and suggestions, we thank Lewis Kornhauser, Richard Revesz, participants in The University of Chicago Law Review’s symposium on “Developing Best Practices for Legal Analysis,” and participants in the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Consumer Contracts project.

Omri Ben-Shahar
Leo and Eileen Herzel Professor of Law and Kearney Director of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics, The University of Chicago Law School
Florencia Marotta-Wurgle
Professor of Law, New York University School of Law

Introduction

Applying a precedent is the fundamental craft of a common-law judge. Judges do not go back to general principles to derive novel solutions to each case at hand, along with novel justifications and renewed persuasion efforts.