Blockchain Papers

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M. van Someren, Vera Hollink

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Igor Galaev, Bo Mattiasson

Intelligent or smart polymers are biocompatible polymeric materials that can respond to the physiological or biological environment by expanding or contracting at different rates. This type of response can be used either to construct biomedical devices or to produce advanced responsive medical systems. In the pharmaceutical field, such systems have been used to develop new types of responsive or pulsatile delivery devices.

Laurence Roth

Drawing Contracts:Will Eisner's Legacy Roth Laurence (bio) Will Eisner . The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2006. Pp. xx + 498. Joann Sfar . The Rabbi's Cat. New York: Pantheon Books, 2005. Pp. 152. Joann Sfar . Klezmer. Book One: Tales of the Wild East. New York and London: First Second, 2006. Pp. 144. JT Waldman . Megillat Esther. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2005. Pp. v + 172. On January 5, 2005, the New York Times published its obituary for Will Eisner, one of the most lauded figures in the world of comics and graphic novels, who had died three days earlier in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, after quadruple bypass surgery. On January 6 the Times ran the following correction: "An obituary of the innovative comic-page illustrator Will Eisner yesterday included an imprecise comparison in some copies between his character The Spirit and others, including Batman. Unlike Superman and some other heroes of the comics, Batman relied on intelligence and skill, not supernatural powers."1 One can only imagine the torrent of e-mails from comics fans pointing out this crucial difference and clucking at the writer's obvious lack of knowledge about the recondite world of superhero comics. It is a difference, of course, that makes even more apt the comparison between Bob Kane's dour, night-stalking masked detective and the dapper, night-stalking masked detective who made Eisner famous in the early 1940s. Both characters were the creations of Jewish comics artists, friends in fact, who attended DeWitt Clinton High School together in the Bronx and grew up during the Depression. It was they and their peers, also primarily Jewish, primarily New Yorkers, who made the comic book form. They helped that form, as Michael Chabon writes in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, "articulate a purpose for itself in the marketplace of ten-cent dreams: to [End Page 463] express the lust for power and the gaudy sartorial taste of a race of powerless people with no leave to dress themselves."2 But Batman and The Spirit also share something else in common. Because they were human rather than superhuman heroes they exemplified a different kind of balance between the "archetypal" and the "typical," Umberto Eco's terms for the mythic and the mimetic dimensions of comic book characters.3 Both Batman and The Spirit, even in their earliest incarnations, intimated that comic book protagonists and stories were capable of transcending stereotypes and reflecting temporal progression and psychological depth. This is perhaps one reason why Frank Miller chose Batman as the character with which to remake the image of the comic book superhero in the 1980s. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns presented comic book readers with a fallible hero in a surprisingly self-reflexive formula story. Eisner, on the other hand, retired The Spirit in 1952. In the latter years of The Spirit's twelve-year run Eisner tired of the demands of a formulaic comic strip, and his work evidenced an increasing interest in formal concerns, in applying to his work the visual lessons of Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, and film noir. Eisner's turn to educational and commercial work in the fifties and sixties, though a lucrative and smart career move, was, in a sense, a waiting period—waiting for comic books to catch up to him, waiting for the right opportunity to explore characters and stories in a more innovative manner. That period ended in 1972 when, as he recounted in a 1990 essay in the New York Times Book Review, he attended his first comic-book convention: "I met the new breed of comic cartoonists for the first time. Long-haired, wild-eyed and intense, they spoke the language of comics. It was a language that gave voice to their protest and social ideas. I wanted to be part of the excitement again."4 Inspired by underground and adult comics of the sixties and early seventies, Eisner took up specifically Jewish characters and topics in a new comics form to which he gave the name "graphic novel." As he says in the introduction to Norton's handsome collection of his first three graphic...

Matthew Jennejohn

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 hold-up problems due to incompleteness, control production arrangements that by their nature invite opportunism? Relying on publicly-available contracts taken from a number of industries, I argue that firms govern their collaborations through a number of new contract mechanisms, the summation of which is a novel governance system. Because traditional theories of contractual control struggle to fully explain this new behavior, I re-conceptualize contracting as an effort, inter alia, to establish a pragmatic learning process between collaborators. Such a learning process must be formally instituted among parties because of the unique, endogenous, and pervasive uncertainty that characterizes bilateral experimentation. Thus, to standard accounts of incomplete contracting, this article provides an alternative (but complementary) explanation of how contract governs inter-firm networks, not by downplaying the importance of hold-ups or by inflating the role of relational norms but by explicating a new positive theory of contract design.

Qerkin Berisha

The paper is written during master studies program at University of Prishtina Law Faculty, the language of the paper is in Albanian and treats the problem of codification of European Contract Law.

Robin Bradley Kar

This Article offers a novel interpretation of contract law, which I call “contract as empowerment.” On this view, contract law is neither a mere mechanism to promote efficiency, as many economists suggest, nor a mere reflection of any familiar moral norm — such as norms of promise keeping, property, or corrective justice. Contract law is instead a mechanism of empowerment: it empowers people to use legally enforceable promises as tools to influence other people’s actions and thereby to meet a broad range of human needs and interests. It also empowers people in a special way, which reflects a moral ideal of equal respect for persons. This fact explains why contract law can produce genuine legal obligations and is not just a system of coercion. This Article introduces contract as empowerment and argues that it offers a theory of contract with distinctive advantages over the alternatives. Contract as empowerment is an interpretive theory: it is simultaneously descriptive, explaining what contract law is, and normative, explaining what contract law should be. To establish the theory’s interpretive credentials, this Article identifies a core set of doctrines and puzzles that are particularly well suited to testing competing interpretations of contract law. It argues that contract as empowerment is uniquely capable of harmonizing this entire constellation of doctrines while explaining the legally obligating force of contracts. Along the way, contract as empowerment offers (1) a more penetrating account of the expectation damages remedy than exists in the current literature, (2) a more compelling account of the consideration requirement, and (3) a concrete framework to determine the appropriate role of certain doctrines — like unconscionability — that appear to limit freedom of contract. The whole of this explanation is greater than the sum of its parts. Because of its harmonizing power, contract as empowerment demonstrates how a broad range of seemingly incompatible surface values in modern contract law can work together — each serving its own distinctive but partial role — to serve a more fundamental principle that is distinctive to contract law. These surface values include the values of fidelity, autonomy, liberty, efficiency, fairness, trust, reliance, and assurance. Although many people think that contract law must involve trade-offs between these values, contract as empowerment suggests that surface tensions between them are not always fundamental or real. So long as the complex system of rules that govern contracts is fashioned in the right way, these doctrines can work together to serve a deeper and normatively satisfying principle that is distinctive to contract. This framework can therefore be used to guide legal reform and identify places in which market regulation is warranted by the principles of contract in many different contexts of exchange — from those involving consumer goods to labor, finance, credit, landlord-tenant arrangements, home mortgages, and many others.

Alan M. White

The law of contracts and consumer protection has been dominated in the recent past by the ideology of rational choice theory. As a descriptive project, rational choice theory holds that consumers express their preferences and maximize their expected utility by making choices in the marketplace. As a normative project, rational choice theory has promoted deregulation of contract terms, based on underlying values of utilitarianism and autonomy. Legislators, judges and agencies have internalized these norms and adopted the deregulation program. The behavioral economics literature has seriously undermined rational choice theory as a description of consumer and seller behavior. In the real world, consumers use abbreviated and biased reasoning and short cuts, are heavily influenced by affect and channeling factors, and respond to framing and endowment effects. Sellers study and understand consumer behavior, and exploit this knowledge. The result in a deregulated marketplace is seller exploitation and consumer harm. Numerous empirical examples of “irrational" consumer behavior and seller exploitation are explored. Law and economics scholarship has been reluctant to face the normative implications of the improved understanding of consumer and seller behavior. “Soft paternalism" seeks to retain the ideal of a perfect market by fixing the information and bias problems, clinging to the values of utilitarianism and autonomy. The insights of behavioral economics may enlighten lawmakers as to how better to strive for genuine autonomy, and genuine utility maximization. Viewing contract law as a tool for justice, however, requires doing more than improving the means without rethinking the ends. A deeper notion of justice requires that we return to the prevention of exploitation of the weak by the powerful, an equity-based value, as one of lodestars for what the law of contracts ought to be.

Catherine L. Fisk

A legal ideology emerged in the 1870s that celebrated contract as the body of law with the particular purpose of facilitating the formation of productive exchanges that would enrich the parties to the contract and, therefore, society as a whole. Across the spectrum of intellectual property, courts used the legal fiction of implied contract, and a version of it particularly emphasizing liberty of contract, to shift control of workplace knowledge from skilled employees to firms while suggesting that the emergence of hierarchical control and loss of entrepreneurial opportunity for creative workers was consistent with the free labor ideology that dominated American thinking on the subject of work. Based on original archival research, this paper explores the stories behind two influential court decisions about employee inventions in the 1890s. In one, a court held that dye recipes were trade secrets owned by a Philadelphia textile mill rather than the human capital of skilled dyers. In the other, a court upheld a contract assigning future patents to the Duke tobacco companies of North Carolina. The paper examines the disjuncture between the rhetoric and doctrine of the court decisions, which assimilated notions of employee dependence and loyalty with the new laissez faire contract, and the norms of the business world in which creative workers operated. It tells the neglected story of how new legal rules transformed entrepreneurship and what that meant for creative workers. These cases, and others like them, rejected the nineteenth century notion that skilled workers and inventive employees were to use their knowledge and ingenuity entrepreneurially. Henceforward, employee knowledge and creativity were deemed to be transferred by an employment contract from employee to firm. The transformation of the employment contract dramatically changed the nature of entrepreneurship by employees, making it much more difficult for inventors to parlay their technical knowledge and business acumen into a successful firm as had been the model of business development to that point. Independent inventors who negotiated carefully for control of their intellectual property rights could remain entrepreneurial. Others would have to pin their hopes on the fortunes of their corporate employers.

Gunnar Stefánsson, Johan Woxenius

The context of transportation has changed significantly with the globalisation of supply chains, steeply rising fuel costs and further emphasis on environmental performance. Since transportation accounts for an ever larger share of costs, lead times and environmental im-pact, there are increased pressures for more efficient execution.Major tools for improving efficiency are the use of information and communication systems to better plan, monitor and control the transport activities. This calls for reliable data capture, storage, processing and communication. Here, recent hardware and software ad-vancements leading to technologies available at a reasonable price wait to be utilised for distributed decision-making.Road hauliers are currently the subjects of significant pressure to incorporate the new ap-plications into their operations from vehicle suppliers, the government and transport buyers; either directly or via their contracted logistics service providers. Hauliers are generally very small companies operating at a very small (if any) profit margin. They are often not able to employ or develop their own technical competence. Hence, they risk being forced to invest in several costly systems with overlapping functionality; each fulfilling certain needs of their strong counterparts rather than their own.This article takes the road hauliers’ perspective, with the purpose of identifying their need for information and communication support, while analyzing how they are matched with the current supply of technologies. The concept of Smart Freight Transport Systems (SFTS) is developed in a case study setting as a departure from the truck and haulier level. The rendering also departs from what is currently available on the market and what is likely to be available within a five-year timeframe rather than trying to define a highly futuristic view.

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Amy Q. Shen, B. D. Hamlington, Michael Knoblauch, Winfried S. Peters · 5 authors

With the discovery in plants of the proteinaceous forisome crystalloid (Knoblauch, et al. 2003), a novel, non-living, ATP-independent biological material became available to the designer of smart materials for advanced actuating and sensing. The in vitro studies of Knoblauch, et al. show that forisomes (2-4 micron wide and 10-40 micron long) can be repeatedly stimulated to contract and expand anisotropically by shifting either the ambient pH or the ambient calcium ion concentration. Because of their unique abilities to develop and reverse strains greater than 20% in time periods less than one second, forisomes have the potential to outperform current smart materials as advanced, biomimetic, multi-functional, smart sensors or actuators. Probing forisome material properties is an immediate need to lay the foundation for synthesizing forisomebased smart materials for health monitoring of structural integrity in civil infrastructure and for aerospace hardware. Microfluidics is a growing, vibrant technology with increasingly diverse applications. Here, we use microfluidics to study the surface interaction between forisome and substrate and the conformational dynamics of forisomes within a confined geometry to lay the foundation for forisome-based smart materials synthesis in controlled and repeatable environment.

Brian Bix

This working paper is an early draft of two chapters (and the Preface and Bibliography) from a larger work on Contract Law (for the series, Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy and Law). The working paper covers the theory-focused part of the project. The paper analyzes what it means to have a theory of Contract, and what the criteria should be for evaluating such theories. The paper concludes that general or universal theories of Contract Law - at least those that have been presented to date (including economic theories of contract law, and deontological theories focusing on promising or autonomy) - cannot be justified, and we must seek instead to construct a theory that focuses on a particular legal system (or small group of legal systems), and that emphasizes the variety of principles and approaches within Contract Law, rather than seeking to find or impose a unity that does not exist. In the course of the argument, the paper also touches on the role of history in explaining legal doctrine, voluntariness in contract formation, the moral obligation to keep contracts, and the relationship between rights and remedies.

Henry Hansmann

Publicly traded corporations rarely use the nearly absolute freedom afforded them to draft charters that deviate from the default terms of state corporation law. Conventional explanations for this phenomenon are unconvincing. A more plausible reason lies in the lack of any feasible amendment mechanism that will assure efficient adaptation of charter terms as changing circumstances dictate during the long expected lifetime of a public corporation. In effect, by adopting state law default terms, corporate shareholders and managers delegate to a third party - the state - the process of amending charter provisions over time. This theory provides much stronger reason for deferring to the law's default rules than do the other theories that have been offered. It implies that default rules may often be nearly as influential as mandatory rules, and that scholars are not wasting their time debating whether one rule of corporate law is more desirable than another even if, as is typical, the rule chosen will be formulated only as a default. This theory also suggests that it might be beneficial if leading corporate law jurisdictions were to provide greater choice among default terms than they currently do.

Andrew M. Tettenborn

The thrust of this paper can be straightforwardly summarized in two propositions. (1)If we accept the principle of punitive damages in tort cases, their appropriateness in at least some suits for breach of contract cannot seriously be questioned. The issue is not so much whether punitive awards should be available for breach of contract, but when. (2)Subject to one possible exception, there is no need for specific restrictions on their availability in breach of contract cases. It is true that there may be a commercial necessity to prevent every breach of contract suit from becoming a potential punitive damages claim: but this, I suggest, can be perfectly well satisfied by applying principles similar to those that already govern damages in torts.

Adetokunbo A. Oyetunji, Stuart D. Anderson

Project delivery systems define the roles and responsibilities of the parties involved in a project. They also establish an execution framework in terms of sequencing of design, procurement, and construction. The decision made in the selection of a project delivery system for a project impacts all phases of execution of the project and greatly impacts the efficiency of project execution. Such decisions should be facilitated by thorough analysis. Structured, quantitative decision analysis processes have been shown to have several benefits over the simplistic, holistic, and informal processes that typically characterize subjective evaluations. However, a dearth of quantitative values of project delivery systems established and validated through research has invariably left project managers with no alternative than to make project delivery selection decisions on the basis of subjective evaluations. Development of the needed quantitative values for application in a decision analysis process would greatly enhance the quality of the decision-making process and provide a defensible rationale for selection of project delivery systems for capital projects. This paper presents research findings that provide the needed quantitative values in this area. Based on the quantitative values defined here, interested parties can develop and implement quantitative evaluation of project delivery alternatives to identify the optimal solution for a given project. Multicriteria decision analysis was found to be the suitable approach for a quantitative, analytical evaluation of project delivery systems. Consequently, the quantitative values presented in this paper were developed in accordance with the requirements of the multicriteria decision analysis technique known as simple multiattribute rating technique with swing weights (SMARTS). Utilizing the quantitative values presented here and applying the analysis technique of SMARTS, a decision support tool has been developed and validated for the Construction Industry Institute. The decision support tool is presently being utilized by member companies of the Construction Industry Institute that were privy to its development. With the presentation of the quantitative values in this paper, other parties interested in developing similar tools would benefit from the research results presented here.

Richard Collier

Over the past decade the relationship between law and popular culture has become the subject of a considerable and growing literature. This work has addressed, via a range of research methods and t...

Eric A. Posner

In an influential article, Ian Ayres and Robert Gertner introduced the concept of the "penalty default rule," a rule that fills a gap in an incomplete contract with a term that would not be chosen by a majority of parties similarly situated to the parties to the contract in question. Ayres and Gertner argued that such a rule might be efficient in a model in which contracting parties have asymmetric information. However, Ayres and Gertner did not provide any persuasive examples of penalty default rules; their best example is the Hadley rule, but this rule is probably not a penalty default rule. It turns out that there are no plausible examples of penalty default rules that solve the information asymmetry problem identified by Ayres and Gertner. The penalty default rule is a theoretical curiosity that has no existence in contract doctrine.

Robin Boyle-Laisure

Contract-drafting courses are gaining in popularity in law school, and they are a pleasure to teach. In July 2005, Northwestern School of Law provided the location and on-site assistance in hosting the first national conference, in recent times, on the topic of Teaching Contract Drafting. Approximately 100 participants attended, indicating the need and growing enthusiasm for guidance on how to develop and teach contract-drafting courses. At the conference, presenters addressed teaching contract drafting to both first-year students and upper-level students. Law schools may offer an upper-level course as a stand-alone, such as the one I have been teaching, in which the students (and the professor) are not linked to a particular doctrinal basis. Alternatively, upper-level professors may focus their contract-drafting course around a specific topic, such as intellectual property, or have their students research actual corporations. The number of credits the course is worth affects classroom instruction; the more time in the classroom, the more in-class drafting and negotiations can occur. This article provides suggestions regarding selecting books, structuring the course, incorporating negotiations, offering learning-styles assessments, and grading assignments. It also offers a comparison to first-year legal writing courses. A contract-drafting course can foster students' self-confidence and enthusiasm for learning, as well as provide them with the necessary tools for practice.

Andrew T. Young, Daniel Levy

We offer the first direct evidence of an implicit contract in a goods market. The evidence we offer comes from the market for Coca-Cola. We demonstrate that the Coca-Cola Company left a substantial amount of written evidence of its implicit contract with its consumers—a very explicit form of an implicit contract. The contract represented the promise of a five cent (nominal) price and adherence to the “Secret Formula”. In general, the implicit nature of such contracts makes observation difficult. To overcome this difficulty, we adopt a narrative approach. Based on the analysis of a large number of historical documents obtained from the Coca-Cola Archives and other sources, we offer evidence of the Coca-Cola Company both acknowledging and acting on this implicit contract. We also make another unique contribution by exploring quality as a margin of adjustment available to Coca-Cola. The implicit contract included a promise not only of a constant nominal price but also a constant quality (i.e., 6.5 oz. of the Secret Formula). During a period of over 70 years, we find evidence of only a single case of true quality change. By studying the margin of adjustment the Coca-Cola Company chose in response to changes in market conditions, we demonstrate that the perceived costs of breaking the implicit contract were large. We argue that one piece of direct evidence on the magnitude of these costs is the aftermath “New Coke’s” introduction in 1985.

Curtis Bridgeman

Corrective-justice theorists have enjoyed a certain amount of success explaining tort law. Some of these theorists have begun to apply corrective-justice theory to the law of contract, but they have not yet explained how corrective justice, which normally argues that private law is concerned with the correction of wrongdoing done to victims by injurers, can explain a body of law like contract that seems indifferent to wrongdoing. In this paper, I argue that this void is a problem for corrective-justice theories of contract, since although contract compensates for breach it does not do so as a way of responding to breach as a form of moral wrongdoing. Corrective justice can still explain contract law, however, because there is a way of understanding corrective justice as the view that private law compensates for losses that are wrongful even though they may or may not be the result of wrongdoing. Moreover, I argue that by understanding corrective justice in this way we achieve a general theory of contract that is more acceptable from the point of view of political liberalism than the current non-corrective accounts of contract.

James W. Ely

This essay examines the origins and early construction of the contract clause of the Constitution. It points out that the contract clause must be understood in the context of the troubled economic circumstances of post-Revolutionary America. The clause, which was little debated at the Philadelphia convention, can be traced to language in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This paper focuses on the contested issue of whether the framers intended the clause to cover only contracts between private parties or to extend to public contracts between states and individuals. As asserted by the Progressive historians, it has long been the dominant position among scholars that Chief Justice John Marshall expanded the meaning of the contract clause when he ruled that the provision governed private contracts. This paper disputes that conventional wisdom and argues that the clause could fairly be construed to safeguard both public and private contracts from state abridgement. It gives attention to discussion at the state ratifying conventions as well as to the views of prominent members of the constitutional convention. The paper also considers pre-Marshall court cases that examined the meaning of the contract clause and the famous 1796 opinion letter by Alexander Hamilton. Although recognizing that it is difficult to establish a collective state of mind concerning the scope of the ban against contractual impairments, the paper concludes that there was ample support for the views later endorsed by the Marshall Court concerning the reach of this provision.

Steven Shavell

When would parties to a contract want performance to be specifically required, and when would they prefer payment of money damages to be the remedy for breach? This fundamental question is studied here, and an answer is provided that is based on a simple distinction between contracts to produce goods and contracts to convey property. Setting aside qualifications, the conclusion for breach of contracts to produce goods is that parties would tend to prefer the remedy of damages, essentially because of the problems that would be created under specific performance if production costs were high. In contrast, parties would often favor the remedy of specific performance for breach of contracts to convey property, in part because there can be no problems with production cost when property already exists. The conclusions reached shed light on the choices made between damages and specific performance under Anglo-American and under civil law systems, and they also suggest the desirability of certain changes in our legal doctrine.