Legal Commentary

I was pleased to see Larry Solum recommending my paper "Contracts and Friendships" as the Download of the Week.  This is a competitve week in light of the submission season and I'm glad to get a little extra attention for what I think is a hard but rewarding paper to read.  I'm interested in your feedback, which you can just e-mail directly to me. 

Two recent events, which broke after I completed the uploaded draft, seem implicated by my analysis in the paper.  First, the AIG bonus fiasco seems to have some intersection with relational contract theory: even if the "bonus" was not a written contract term (and I have no idea what the written contracts looked like), at least some people seem to be arguing that the bonuses are essentially contractual entitlements because of the internal norms of the industry.  That is a relationalist argument at its core, coming from many who don't like to think of themselves as such.

Second, this case about a friend who took a blood oath to pay his friend back money he lost in a failed investment was deemed an unenforceable gift promise.  That's pretty conventional consideration analysis, since the blood and promise to pay $170,000 was not bargained-for.  Still, some of the arguments I've been making in my friendship & law research agenda suggest that under some conditions between friends, we ought to be a little less conventional in our analysis and allow such informal deals between friends to be enforceable.  I can't comment on the actual case because the factual development in the public record is thin.  But there are cases I report upon in "Friendship & the Law" that reveal courts allowing informality in friendly transactions, all while finding such informal dealings enforceable.