Julian Nyarko

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Volume 89.4
Contractual Evolution
Matthew Jennejohn
Professor of Law, BYU Law School
Julian Nyarko
Assistant Professor of Law, Stanford Law School
Eric Talley
Isidor & Seville Sulzbacher Professor and Faculty Codirector of the Millstein Center for Global Markets & Corporate Ownership, Columbia Law School

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 have offered stylized accounts of this evolutionary process, we still lack a coherent, general theory that broadly captures the dynamics of real-world contracting practice. This paper advances such a theory, in which the evolution of contract terms is a byproduct of several key features, including efficiency concerns, information, and sequential learning by attorneys who negotiate several deals over time.

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88.1
Stickiness and Incomplete Contracts
Julian Nyarko
Assistant Professor of Law, Stanford Law School.

For helpful comments and suggestions, I thank Adam Badawi, Douglas Baird, Robert Bartlett, Andrew Bradt, Guy-Uriel Charles, Benjamin Chen, Adam Chilton, Albert Choi, Ryan Copus, Robert Cooter, John Coyle, Kevin Davis, John DeFigueredo, Josh Fischman, Jeffrey Gordon, Joe Grundfest, Mitu Gulati, Andrew Guzman, Deborah Hensler, Tim Holbrook, Bert Huang, William Hubbard, Matthew Jennejohn, Francine Lafontaine, Katerina Linos, Jonathan Masur, Justin McCrary, Joshua Mitts, Kevin Quinn, Bertrall Ross, Sarath Sanga, Robert Scott, Megan Stevenson, Eric Talley, Glenn West, Diego Zambrano, and Eyak Zamir, as well as the participants of workshops at Columbia Law School, NYU School of Law, Stanford Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, University of Virginia School of Law, University of Michigan Law School, UC Davis School of Law, University of Hamburg Faculty of Law, the 2020 American Bar Association M&A Committee Meeting, the 2020 Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting, the 2020 Stanford-IACCM Symposium, the 2019 Northwestern Conference on Law and Textual Analysis, the 2019 Annual Empirical Contracts Workshop at Penn, the 2019 Annual Meeting of the German Law and Economics Association, the 2018 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, the 2018 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies in Europe, and the 2018 International Conference on the Economics of Litigation.

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