Section on Contracts
Marina Salon G, South Tower/Level 3, San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina
Immutable Rules and Contract Law
One or more presenters were selected from a call for papers.
In the last three decades, legal scholars have paid considerable attention to the conceptualization and prudential design of contractual rules. Most of this attention has been placed on default rules (e.g., should we prefer "majoritarian" rules that mimic the likely intent of the parties, or "penalty" rules that purportedly force information revelation)? Part of this concentration on immutable rules has been due to a sense among law scholars that the rationales for immutable rules were well understood. In recent years, however, important contributions within legal scholarship, humanities, and social sciences have alerted us to a number of ways that contracting may fail (due to transaction costs, cognitive failure, externalities, path dependence, etc), which in turn reasserts the importance of understanding the role of immutable rules. This panel is intended both to survey and to evaluate the set of immutable rules within a system of contract and commercial law, concentrating on three questions:
(1) What are the key immutable rules within contract law?
(2) What are the principal policy rationales behind immutable rules in contract law?
(3) How well equipped is contract law (compared to other areas of law) to contend with these policy concerns.
Business Meeting at Program Conclusion.
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