Contractual Black Holes

Conference on Contractual Black Holes

April 7th and 8th, 2017 at Duke Law School

Sponsored by the Columbia Law School Center on Contract and Economic Organization and the Kauffman Foundation, the NYU Law School Pollack Center for Law and Business and the Duke Law School Center for Comparative and International Law & the Center for Race, Law and Politics. 

Conference Schedule (PDF: 148 KB)

Papers:

Robert Anderson (Pepperdine) & Jeffrey Manns (GW), Boiling Down Boilerplate Provisions in M&A Agreements

Aditi Bagchi (Fordham), A Charitable Reading of Grey Holes

Omri Ben Shahar (Chicago) & Lior Strahilewitz (Chicago), Interpreting Contracts Via Surveys and Experiments

Michelle Boardman (GMU), Blank, Black, and Grey Holes in Insurance Contracts

William Bratton (Penn) & Adam Levitan (Georgetown), The New Bond Workouts

Stephen Choi (NYU), Mitu Gulati (Duke) & Robert Scott (Columbia) – The Variation in Boilerplate: Rational Design or Random Mutation?

John Coates (Harvard), Why Have M&A Contracts Grown: Evidence From Twenty Years of Deals

John Coyle (UNC) & Mark Weidemaier (UNC), Interpreting Contracts Without Context

Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci (Amsterdam) & Florencia Marotta Wurgler (NYU), Learning in the Standard Form Contract Setting 

Christopher Drahozal (Kansas), Third-Party Boilerplate Providers and Contractual Black Holes

Ofer Eldar (Duke) and Emily Strauss (Duke), Systemic Risk in Financial Contracting

Anna Gelpern (Georgetown), The Importance of Being Standard

Matthew Jennejohn (BYU), Asymmetric Standardization in M&A

Marcel Kahan (NYU) & Shmuel Leshem (USC),  Moral Hazard and Sovereign Debt: The Role of Contractual Ambiguity and Asymmetric Information

Tracy Lewis (Duke) & Alan Schwartz (Yale), Contract Law with Multi-Unit Sales

Peter Linzer (University of Houston Law Center), Discussing the Papers: From Pari passu to Dobby A Free Elf - Of Lack of Understanding and Lack of Intent

Barak Richman (Duke) & Kevin Schulman (Duke), The Costs of Contractual Complexity: (A)nother Proposal to Reduce Healthcare Costs

Jerome Sgard (Sciences Po), Standard Contracts as Gateways to Global Markets: The experience of the London Corn Trade Association (1878-1914)