Regulating Contracts »

London School of Economics and Political Science

Using an interdisciplinary approach involving economics, sociology, and law, this book examines the purposes, efficiency, and efficacy of legal regulation of contracts and suggests how legal regulation fails and how it might be improved. The conclusions suggest that the law plays an insignificant role in the construction of markets, and that it could provide better assistance by using indeterminate regulation that permits the recontextualization of legal reasoning.

Part 1: Introduction
1. The Tasks for Regulating Contracts
2. The Meaning of Contract: How Contract Thinks About Association; Contractualization of Social Life; Meaning of Contractual Relations; Embeddedness
Part 2: The New Regulation
3. The Discourses of Legal Regulation: Normative Complexity; Self-reference and Closure; The Doctrinal Classification System; The Collision of Private Law with Public Regulation; The Productive Disintegration of Private Law
4. The Capacity of Private Law: Private Law as Regulation; Reflexive Regulation; Standard Setting; Monitoring and Enforcement; Conclusion
Part 3: Regulation in the Construction of Markets
5. The Construction of Markets: Trust and Sanctions; Markets Without a State; The Construction of Trust; The Construction of Non-legal Sanctions; The Significance of Legal Sanctions; The Adjudication Process; Conclusion
6. Rationality of Contractual Behaviour: Three Frameworks of Contractual Behaviour; The Non-Use of Contracts; Relational and Discrete Contracts; Reasonable Expectations
7. Planning and Co-operation: Lawyers as Engineers; Informality in Business Dealings; Incompleteness in Planning Documents; Risk; Insufficient Specificity of Self-regulation; Flexibility; Conclusion
8. Formalism and Efficiency: The Form of Legal Doctrine; Closure and Expectation; Commercial Arbitration; Reasoning in the Common Law; The Virus of Formalism; A Transformation in Legal Doctrine?
9. Contract as Thing: Money; Formality; Legal Pluralism; Futures Contracts; Club Markets; Self-regulating Associations
Part 4: Distributive Tasks of Regulation
10. Power and Governance: Mass Contracts; Principal and Agent; Contract and Organisation; Conclusion
11. Unfair Contracts: The Illusion of Unfairness; Open Texture Rules; Regulatory Backfiring; The Adequacy of Regulating Market Failure; Conclusion
12. Quality: Efficient Level of Quality; Form of Standards; Monitoring and Enforcement; Conclusion
13. Government by Contract: Public Services and the Market Mechanism; The Problem of Co-operation; The Problem of Quality; Quasi-Contract in Government; Conclusion
14. Dispute Settlement: The Taste for Litigation; Vindication of Contractual Rights; Access to Justice; For Settlement
15. Conclusion Bibliography Table of Cases Table of Statutes Index