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Many accounts of contract law are promise based, however, these accounts fail to treat The Promise as a tangible social institution. Also, legal realist and law and economic accounts of contract law fail to acknowledge that The Promise exists at all. Using scholarship from political economy, this Article shows that The Promise and contract law are distinct entities. This differs from promissory accounts which treat contracts as a subspecies of promises. This gap in the scholarship matters because the existence of The Promise raises important normative considerations that existing accounts cannot accommodate by failing to address the existence of The Promise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many contract theorists argue that contracts are promises. This view is appealing because it can justify the institution of contract law--contract law allows parties to vindicate their promissory rights. But contract-as-promise advocates have seriously misunderstood how promises work. They assume a cartoon version of promises, one that is overly abstract, individualistic, and is singularly fixated on the obligation to do what one promised. Such theorists have failed to adequately attend to other important dimensions of promises: How stringent is the promise? Under what conditions is a person obligated to perform? How is an agent entitled to respond to a breach? How should a promisee respond to a request for release? When should a promisee agree to renegotiate? These features of promissory morality vary radically across different kinds of human relationships--e.g., marriage, friendship, employment, parenting, and commercial bargains. This is an important result for contract theory. Courts routinely invoke the idea of a general, uniform set of contract principles applicable to all contracts. But if promissory morality doesn't justify applying uniform contract principles across different contracting relationships, then likely nothing does. We should thus liberate ourselves from the idea of general contract principles and embrace a kind of contractual pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parties make hundreds of campaign promises but not all are seen by voters as central to a party's offering. Studies of government promise fulfillment accept that not all promises are equivalent but in practice treat all promises equally because they lack an appropriate means of measuring promise centrality. To demonstrate the importance of accounting for pledge fulfillment, we develop a conjoint experiment method to measure public opinion about promise centrality which can be used to construct centrality weights. We demonstrate this approach's utility by examining the 2017 UK Conservative manifesto. Centrality weighting reduces our assessment of Conservative promise keeping by 21 percentage points (1.3 standard deviations of typical promise-completion rates found in comparative studies). Weighting increases the centrality of EU promises sevenfold and immigration promises sixfold, and reduces the centrality of miscellaneous administrative promises by more than half. These results illustrate that pledge centrality cannot be ignored when assessing pledge fulfillment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the question of whether unknowable obligations are possible. According to the popular view (known as Access), an act is obligatory only if its agent can know that this act is obligatory. Sorensen (1995) argues against Access, and Sider and Wieland both defend Access by suggesting (S) – For any obligation O, individual X must refrain from making O unknowable. We consider various difficulties concerning the possibility of (S) – an infinite regress, self-referential nature of (S), unprovability of (S). It is argued that (S), from a certain perspective, is itself the unknowable obligation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article offers a theoretical framework for thinking about contract remedies. The argument starts from the distinction between rights and remedies in contract law. The distinction is consistent with the doctrinal structure of contract law in Western legal systems and with the available empirical evidence regarding contractual parties' expectations. An adequate theory of contract remedies must start by taking this distinction seriously. The Article illustrates this point through an analysis of two influential views in the American law of contract remedies: Shiffrin's analysis of the divergence between contract and promise, and Markovits and Schwartz's defense of expectation damages. On the basis of the right-remedy distinction, the Article argues that contract remedies have two central roles: protecting both the integrity of the practice of contracting and the individuals who engage in it. Because of these roles, there is a pro tanto reason for a certain resemblance or proportionality between remedies and the primary contractual rights they enforce. But this reason is only one of the relevant considerations in the design and evaluation of contract remedies. Once we bear in mind the distinction between rights and remedies, remedial analysis can also incorporate other morally relevant considerations beyond the central function of remedies. In order to show this, the Article offers a defense of money damages that incorporates those additional considerations. The Article, thus, offers a novel integrated framework for remedial analysis that can clarify some of the debates that have perplexed contract theorists writing about contract remedies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the notion of a promissory right captures a central feature of the morality of promising which cannot be explained by the notion of promissory obligation alone: the fact that the promisee acquires a full range of control over the promisor's obligation. It defends two main claims. First, it argues that promissory rights are distinctively grounded in our interest in controlling others' deontic world. Second, it proposes a version of the 'Interest Theory' of rights (the 'Deontic Interest Theory') that incorporates our interest in purely deontic forms of control into the various human interests that constitute the grounds of our rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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We investigate why people keep their promises in the absence of external enforcement mechanisms and reputational effects. In a controlled laboratory experiment we show that exogenous variation of second-order expectations (promisors' expectations about promisees' expectations) leads to a significant change in promisor behavior. We provide evidence that a promisor's aversion to disappointing a promisee's expectation leads her to behave more generously. We propose and estimate a simple model of conditional guilt aversion that is supported by our results and nests the findings of previous contributions as special cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this piece, I argue that promises need not be kept just because they were made. This is not to say, however, that unwise, unhappy, and unfortunate promises do not generate obligations. When broken promises will result either in wrongful gains to promisors or wrongful losses to promisees, obligations of corrective justice will demand that such promises be kept if their breach cannot be fully repaired. Thus, when a broken promise will constitute a deliberate loss transfer for personal gain, the duty not to exact unjust enrichment (a wrongful gain) will require a promisor either to honor her promise or craft a means of ensuring that the promisee's impoverishment is not traded for her enrichment. And when a broken promise will constitute the culpable imposition of a reliance-based injury on a nonculpable promisee (a wrongful loss), the duty to make others whole when one has purposefully, knowingly, or recklessly injured them will require one either to keep one's promise or to fashion a remedy for its breach that ensures that the promisee is left no worse off than he would be had the promise not been made. This account explicitly parts ways with normative powers theories of promising. It places no weight at all on the raw fact that a promise has been made. Instead, it locates the gravamen of a promissory violation in the harm that is caused to a promisee who nonculpably relies upon and changes her position in anticipation of the prediction about the promisor's future conduct that is embedded in his promise. Absent any adverse reliance on the part of a promisee, there is nothing that gives rise to an obligation of performance or repair on the part of the promisor. But this account is also to be distinguished from utilitarian theories that take promises to be instruments of wealth maximization that properly give way whenever the reason for honoring them speaks in favor of violating them. On my account, the balance of reasons for action that determines the morality of performance includes deontological rights and duties, agent-relative permissions, and Hohfeldian liberties. As I shall argue, even if one rightly concludes that one has no duty either to keep a promise or to craft a remedy for its breach, one must nevertheless remember that virtue requires one to be or become the kind of person who often goes beyond the call of duty. But the fact that virtue often requires us to do what we have no duty to do should not cause us to confuse its conditions with the conditions of right and wrong action. We have a duty to keep promises or to otherwise protect the reliance interests that they generate only when failing to do so will lead either to our own unjust enrichment or to others' unjust injury. And this means that we have a duty to keep promises in far fewer circumstances than is commonly believed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, the divorce literature has mainly focused on the introduction of no-fault and unilateral divorce grounds to explain the positive relation between 'making divorce easier' and divorce rates. We use the case study of Belgium to demonstrate that both no-fault and unilateral might not be the ideal proxies for 'making divorce easier', because the procedural level of legislation is entirely disregarded. Therefore, we propose an alternative proxy which does manage to capture the time-varying legislative environment, namely the duration of the legal divorce process. We find that a reduction in the duration of the divorce process by a month increases the divorce trend with about 1.4 %. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers what it would mean if Canada fulfilled select existing commitments and obligations concerning the mental health needs of Indigenous peoples, as identified through current programs and recent jurisprudence: that is, where would we be if Canada carried through on existing commitments? After identifying the role of law in perpetuating poor mental well-being, it assesses programs for First Nations and Inuit peoples and determines they are unlikely to be effective without operational changes and responsive funding. The article then turns to the situation of Metis and non-status First Nations and the implications of Daniels v. Canada for changing the status quo -- both by requiring appropriate mental health supports, and by dismantling the racist legal logic that has long undermined the mental well-being of non-status First Nations and Metis persons, by positioning them as not counting as true Indigenous peoples. The article concludes that merely fulfilling current state obligations could bring considerable short-term gains, and some long-term gains, for the mental well-being of Indigenous peoples in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exception of contract non-performance implies that the person exercising it is the debtor of a due obligation and that s/he has no other reason to refuse to perform his/her contractual obligation than the other party's refusal to perform its correlated obligation. Therefore, exceptio non adimpleti contractus is a preventive remedy, i.e. it prevents the situation where one of the contracting parties performs its own obligation and can no longer obtain anything from the other party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In legal systems, the intention of people in certainty of legal performance plays the main role and the contracts & transaction attributes to persons' intention as the general & public principle. The people by their intention establish obligation & undertakings for themselves and others in the frame of contracts & unilateral obligations, in the realm of law to obtain the commitment force for his/her intention that causes establishing the commitments and the responsibilities of the peoples. The volition is consisted of intention & consent elements for establishing the commitment, in other words each of these elements, intention and consent are efficient in the situation of legal act through canceling or lack of legal act influence. The quality of this effecting and performance guaranty of the lack of each main conditions in certainty of the volition in the field of contracts have been considered and the rule in the field of contracts has been clarified in civil code but in unilateral obligations, in respect of unilateral obligations, there are some ambiguities in the role and clarifying basic conditions which these ambiguities are the results of leaving unsaid the many regulations about unilateral obligations in civil code by the jurisprudents and the legislators. In this article creative intention in unilateral obligations to be surveyed and it would be a step for clarifying the opposed and agreed views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals have various kinds of obligations: keep promises, don’t cause harm, return benefits received from injustices, be partial to loved ones, help the needy and so on. How does this work for group agents? There are two questions here. The first is whether groups can bear the same kinds of obligations as individuals. The second is whether groups’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do to the same degree that individuals’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do. We argue for parity on both counts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the legal issues involved with prove-me-wrong offers, with types of offers, promises and reward the advertisements for goods or services. It mentions that reported opinions involving the enforceability of prove-me wrong offers and the law of consideration and promissory estoppel. It also mentions that consideration for prove-me-wrong offers for promissory estoppel as a preferable theory.

For the last two decades, scholars have explored the importance of executive orders as a powerful presidential unilateral power (Mayer 2001, Moe and Howell 1999, Deering and Maltzman 1999, Krause and Cohen 1997, Ragsdale and Theis 1997, Shull and Gomez 1997). These studies fall into two camps. The proponents of the strategic model include scholars like Richard Nathan and Phillip Cooper. In his pivotal study the Administrative Presidency, Nathan argues that presidents strategically use unilateral powers when they are weak. When presidents have limited resources and face a hostile political environment they can compensate their weakness by using an administrative strategy. The enhancement camp argues that presidents use executive orders to enhance policy in conjunction with Congress in times of strong congressional support (Shull and Gomez 1997, Krause and Cohen 1997). Presidents can enhance their stature with the use of unilateral powers when they have strong resources and a cooperative political environment. The same debate can be applied to other unilateral powers. This paper will examine these competing theories by extending the study of unilateral powers to presidential proclamations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author discusses the practical inferences, logic of promising and legal reasoning of moral and political philosopher Joseph Raz. Topics discussed include practical critical attitude with operative reasons, possibility of inferences with in the belief of conclusions and the legal philosophy in the positivism.

In this article, the author comments on the article "The Promise of the Patent in Canada and Around the World" by Richard Gold and Michael Short related to the doctrine of promise, utility and patent law in Canada.

The article focuses on the exclusion of gift promising criteria from contract laws. Topics discussed include impact of third-party beneficiary technique on promisors, views on enforcement of gift promising in contract laws and legal significance of third-party beneficiary law. It further discusses the future aspects related to gift promise in contract law.

The article discusses issues regarding the doctrine of "promise of the patent" in Canada and other countries. Topics discussed include promises representing a novel and unjustified increase to the utility standard, the promise of the patent being established rule in patent law with sound policy justifications, and law analysis demonstrating role of promises in both the U.S. and European patent law. It mentions open issues and unanswered questions of the Canadian law of promises.

Copyright of Revista Română de Drept al Afacerilor is the property of Wolters Kluwer Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article presents information on the challenges posed by the incompatibility of penalties rule with promise theory in context to contractual law criticism. It informs that promise theory can respond to criticism in several ways which include, by disputing the critic's view of promise, regarding contract doctrines as targets of criticism and by taking contractual doctrines to be explained by reasons different from that of legal enforcement.

The article proposes a theoretical set of reasons for the contractual doctrine, with special focus on the incorporation of a notion of a non-contemplated event. It discusses a conventional economic theory of contract law, which suggests that release of a promisor is due to its desirable effect on incentives of a promise. It manifests that law of common mistake allows relief when parties share an erroneous supposition about an existing fact regarding their agreement.

The Article explained the meaning of promise {al Wad} and discussed about the Opinions of Muslim scholars with regard to the binding nature of promise in Islamic law and analyzed their evidences on their view points and provided the preference in this regard. The article described the opinion of Muslim jurists with regard to validity of contract concluded on the bases of promise and analyzed their arguments in detail and provided the preference in this regard. This article analyzed the opinion of contemporary scholars who hold that promise is binding and enforceable by court and the contract which based on such promise is also valid and the article rejected their opinion with strong evidences and mentioned that the opinion of contemporary scholars does not have any conformity with the opinion of classical jurists neither Hanfi, Shafei and Hanbi Jurist nor Malki jurists and proved that the opinion of contemporary jurists is combined from the clashes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the question whether, under the German law of obligations as laid out in the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (Civil Code, BGB), liabilities and damages from breaches of contract can be construed based on the doctrine of promises or that of culpa in contrahendo. The author considers the provisions on the rights and obligations of contractual parties under article 280, section I of the BGB. He also addresses broader implications of this question for contract theory and the objective or subjective justification of claims.

The article focuses on the validity of 'no oral modification' (NOM) clauses contained in electronic communications under U.S. contract law. Topics include contract modification under common law, the obligations of contracted parties. Information is provided on the U.S. court cases CX Digital Media Inc. v. Smoking Everywhere Inc. and Stevens v. Publicis SA.

The article discusses several Australian legal cases as of July 2012, including All Covers & Accessories Pty. Ltd. v. Sidowi which deals with a bailment, Barrett v. Bem which deals with the validity of a signature on a will, and Ashton v. Pratt which deals with the enforcement of a promise made within the context of an immoral arrangement. In the Barrett case, a testator in a hospital bed was reportedly too weak to sign his own will, so his sister signed it at his request.

This study addresses the question of whether and how legal authorities ought to intervene in work organizations in order to most effectively regulate the behavior of employees. This question is examined empirically, by exploring whether the association between the level of fairness employees experience in procedures regarding pay and benefits, and their adherence to workplace rules, differs depending upon whether those procedures are enacted by companies voluntarily or mandated by law. This question was addressed using both a survey of a representative sample of employees in Israel, as well as their reactions to an experimental vignette. The results generally suggest that evaluations of the procedural justice of performance appraisal hearings more strongly influenced judgments of overall workplace fairness, perceptions of management legitimacy, and employee rule-adherence behavior when employees believed fairer workplace procedures were required by law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Oregon court case West Linn Corporate Park v. City of West Linn, which dealt with ad hoc development obligations in property law. Topics include the U.S. federal takings law, exactions of property as a condition of development rights, and regulatory takings of real property.

The article discusses the contract law and states that a contract is a legally enforceable promise with a moral obligation. It further shows why a promissory is morally bound to keep his promise and why in common law cases a divergence exists between the legal and the moral obligations. It also shows that the common law's reluctance to award specific performance, despite its undoubted acceptance that it is the appropriate moral response to promise breaking can be justified on many grounds.

This Article is a companion to the author's article published in this Journal in the spring of 2000 analyzing the liability, compensation, and financial responsibility aspects of the first decade of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA or OPA 90). This Article resumes the story of the statute's promise versus its performance with respect to those subjects where the previous article left off and carries it forward through the Deepwater Horizon incident and its aftermath as of August 26, 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on indeterminacy and U.S. restitution laws. Topics include the recovery of funds in equitable actions, the prevention of unjust enrichment, and contractual liability for restitution. Information is provided on remedies within tort law and legal obligations in instances of breach of contract.

The article discusses the distinction between a contract an and a private promise based on the law. Where a contract has been conceptualized as a specie of a promise, it notes that contractual promises do not have a voluntary character unlike a private promise where a promisor creates a sufficient reason to perform the content of such promise. Meanwhile, it suggests that one can mitigate the conflict between private and legal promise by limiting the remedies for breach.

Contract law is generally understood to require no more of a person who breaches a contract than to give the injured promisee the "benefit of the bargain." The law is thus assumed to permit a promise-breaker to keep any profit remaining from breach, after putting the victim in the position he would have been in had the promise been performed. This conventional description is radically wrong: across a wide range of circumstances, standard contract doctrines actually do require people to keep their promises, or to disgorge their entire profit from breach if they do not. Rather than protecting the expectation interest of injured promisees, therefore, the law of contract remedies is better characterized as enforcing "promisor expectation" or disgorgement, a regime that puts breaching promisors in the position they would have been in had they performed, even when that means overcompensating injured victims. We offer two explanations for why we so often see "promisor expectation" remedies, even though contracting parties would prefer the remedy of perfect promisee expectation damages. First, promisor expectation is often much easier for courts to compute or implement than promisee-based remedies. Second, promisors themselves prefer to be subject to the promisor expectation regime because it allows them to commit credibly to perform their promises. Such commitments are valuable but cannot be sustained if the law awards damages that fall short of perfect promisee expectation, as it invariably does. By agreeing to a remedial scheme that makes it unprofitable or impossible for them to profit from breach, promisors can credibly commit to perform and thus realize a higher contract price ex ante. An "overcompensatory" remedy thus paradoxically serves the interests of promisors by providing them a valuable bonding mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the enforceability of promises between public and private actors. Topics include commercial promises, the ethical value of a promise, and promises to deliver a good or service. Information is provided on conditional promises, bifurcated promises, and the legal obligation created by a promise.

The article discusses the divergence between promise and contract law with reference to the theory by Professor of Philosophy Seana Shiffrin and Professor David Owens' "A Simple Theory of Promising." In Shiffrin's view, a contract is roughly equivalent to a promise and that a promise may accompany a contract. David Owens' "A Simple Theory of Promising" explains why the institution of promising exists, and concludes that it has arisen as a tool that serves our authority-interests.

The article discusses promise in terms of morality and law. It presents various characteristics of law which include behavior regulation, a network of relationships of exchange and it operates within an adversarial, polarized framework of human interaction. With reference to the writings of ethical contractualist, it argues that law has a significant impact on dominant theories of modern moral philosophy. It also criticises writers to ignore the relational aspects of promises.

This paper examines the legitimacy element of the doctrine of legitimate expectations in English administrative law. It argues that the underlying principle is the voluntary assumption of responsibility that comes from analysing a promise as a social convention. From this underlying principle, it argues that the current 'clear unambiguous representation' test is insufficiently certain and instead advocates a three-stage test centred round the courts' ability to make an order, the objective construction of the promise and the decision makers' intent. This test, it is argued, explains the decided cases, as well as providing a robust structure for future decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]