מרכז ספרא מארח Prof. Yair Listokin Yair Listokin is the Shibley Family Fund Professor of Law at Yale Law School.

הזמנה 

Contractual excuse doctrine presents the greatest enigma of contract law. Excuse
allows courts to release parties from their contractual obligations. It thus stands
in sharp contrast to the basic principles of contract law and adds significant
uncertainty to contract adjudication. This Article offers a crucial missing perspective
on the doctrine of excuse: the view from a macroeconomic lens. Macroeconomics
offers a new justification for the law of excuse, and new ways for understanding
the doctrine’s mysteries, creating Excuse 2.0.
We offer a simple macroeconomic model of excuse doctrine, highlighting the role
the doctrine plays under conditions of economic crisis and potential recession. Our
analysis illustrates a counterintuitive advantage of excuse doctrine, suggesting
that the legal uncertainty surrounding the doctrine can operate to induce losssharing
between classes of contractual parties, thus minimizing the costs of
long-term economic instability. In the Covid crisis, for example, excuse doctrine
enabled an extraordinary wave of contractual renegotiation and loss sharing—
without triggering excessive litigation. We discuss the interpretive and normative
implications of our analysis and highlight its significance for contemporary policy
debates in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.