This important volume presents a rich collection of ideas on and insights into the law and economics of contracts. It includes material relevant to a large number of legal fields. Many of the articles are classics that have, over the years, become focal points for continuing debate; others provide an easily accessible account of particular areas. The editor's comprehensive introduction provides an overview of law and economics scholarship in contracts over the past few decades and a portal into an evolving field. Topics include: the economics of contracting; efficient breach and renegotiation; expectation damages and its alternatives; default rules and mass markets.

Every legal system must decide how to distinguish between agreements that are enforceable and those that are not. Formal bargains in the marketplace and casual promises in a social setting mark the two extremes, but many hard cases lie between. When gaps are left in a contract, how should courts fill them? What does it mean to say that an agreement is legally enforceable? If someone breaks a legally enforceable contract, what consequences follow? For 150 years, legal scholars have debated whether a set of coherent principles provide answers to such basic questions. Oliver Wendell Holmes put forward the affirmative case, arguing that bargained-for consideration, expectation damages, and a handful of related ideas captured the essence of contract law. The work of the next several generations, culminating in Grant Gilmore's The Death of Contract in 1974, took a contrary view. The coherence Holmes had tried to bring to the field was illusory. It was more sensible to see contracts as merely a species of civil obligation and resist the temptation to impose rigid and artificial rules. In Reconstructing Contracts, Douglas Baird takes stock of the current state of contract doctrine and in the process reinvigorates the classic framework of Anglo-American contract law. He shows that Holmes's principles are fundamentally sound. Even if they lack that talismanic quality formerly ascribed to them, properly understood they continue to provide the best guide to contracts for a new generation of students, practitioners, and judges.

This text applies the tools of game theory and information economics to advance the understanding of how laws work. Organized around the major solution concepts of game theory, the authors shows how such well-known games as the prisoner's dilemma, the battle of the sexes, beer-quiche and the Rubinstein bargaining game can illuminate many different kinds of legal problems. The organization of Game Theory and the Law serves to highlight the basic mechanisms at work and to lay out a natural progression in the sophistication of the game concepts and legal problems considered.

The law of corporate reorganizations controls the fate of enterprises worth billions of dollars and has reshaped entire sectors of the economy, yet its inner workings largely remain a mystery. Judges must police a small and closed fraternity of professionals as they sit down at a conference table and forge a new future for a distressed business, but little appears to tell judges how they are to do this. Judges, however, are in fact bound by a coherent set of unwritten principles that derive from a statute Parliament passed in 1571. These principles are not simply norms or customary practices. They have hard edges, judges must enforce them, and parties are bound by them as they are by any other law. This book traces the evolution of these unwritten principles and makes accessible a legal world that has long been closed off to outsiders.

The law of corporate reorganizations controls the fate of enterprises worth billions of dollars and has reshaped entire sectors of the economy, yet its inner workings largely remain a mystery. Judges must police a small and closed fraternity of professionals as they sit down at a conference table and forge a new future for a distressed business, but little appears to tell judges how they are to do this. Judges, however, are in fact bound by a coherent set of unwritten principles that derive from a statute Parliament passed in 1571. These principles are not simply norms or customary practices. They have hard edges, judges must enforce them, and parties are bound by them as they are by any other law. This book traces the evolution of these unwritten principles and makes accessible a legal world that has long been closed off to outsiders.