Regulation By Contract

Contract and Regulation: A Handbook on New Methods of Law Making in Private Law sheds light on the darker side of contracts. It begins by exploring the ‘regulatory space’ in which projects are planned, deals are done, and goods and services are consumed, then shows how a ‘bottom-up’ approach can be adopted in order to view this transactional space through the eyes of contractors. The expert contributors explore modes of governance that do not fit nicely into traditional contract theory, paying special attention to three key examples: governance and codes of conduction, networks and relations, compliance and use.

In many regions of the world and across various fields, law has become a product. Individuals and companies seek attractive legal regulations and countries advertise their legal wares globally as they compete for customers. To analyse this development and to develop policy recommendations with respect to contract law and dispute resolution a conference was held in Munich in October 2011, bringing together leading scholars in the field of contract law and dispute resolution from the US and Europe. This book presents the papers and main comments produced for that conference. The chapters include important papers on, inter alia, law and economic theory, legal transplants, theories of private law, choice of law, the characterisation of contract law and the English and American civil procedural traditions.

Regulatory Failure and Renewal develops a framework to understand the choice of regulatory instrument used in Canada for natural monopolies such as telephone companies, water utilities, streetcars, hydroelectricity, and railways from the 1880s to the 1930s. Using the transaction-cost literature pioneered by Oliver Williamson, John Baldwin examines the nature of contractual failure in Canada in natural monopoly cases, asking why initial forms of contracts between the state and private enterprise failed and why this failure so often resulted in the use of public enterprise. Baldwin outlines early attempts to deal with natural monopolies – from the use of a franchise contract to regulatory tribunals and finally to public enterprise – and compares Canadian experiences to US approaches, which turned more frequently to regulatory tribunals. This difference is due to Canada’s more limited constraints on the state’s ability to exercise coercive power, which sometimes leads to contractual failure that results in replacing franchise and regulatory frameworks with public enterprise. Regulatory Failure and Renewal demonstrates that public enterprise arose not so much as part of a purposive choice but because of reoccurring failures in the contractual process between the Canadian state and private enterprise.

Using an interdisciplinary approach involving economics, sociology and law, Regulating Contracts explores fundamental questions about the purposes and effects of legal regulation of contractual relationships. What kind of social relation do contracts create, or, more precisely, how do contracts govern social interaction. How are contractual relations, or more generally, markets constructed? Does the law play a significant role in particular practices, and in particular, what do lawyers, courts, and legal sanctions contribute to the contractual social order? For what distributive purposes does the law attempt regulation? The controversial conclusions of this study suggest that the law plays an insignificant role in the construction of markets, and that law and lawyers could provide better assistance by using indeterminate regulation that permits the recontextualization of legal reasoning. Legal regulation of contracts concerned with redistributive tasks, such as redressing unfairness, countering unjust power relations, and improving access to justice, is evaluated both with respect to the objectives of regulation and the search for the most efficient and efficacious form of regulation. The argument in the book is that control of unfairness is both desirable and practicable, that power relations should be modified for the sake of efficiency, and that better access to justice is unhelpful to the resolution of contractual disputes.

Privity is an extensive analysis of the theoretical issues raised by the question of third-party rights in contract. More than just an examination of the practical problems of the Privity rule itself, it questions whether contract is to be seen as a matter of public regulation or private justice.

FAO’s previous contribution to the development of contract farming saw the publication in 2015 of the UNIDROIT/FAO/IFAD Legal Guide on Contract Farming, which focused on the bilateral relationship between an agricultural producer and a contractor. This Legislative Study develops that research and focuses on the regulatory frameworks for contract farming, aiming to highlight different possible approaches for different contexts. Responsible contract farming can be a powerful tool for small scale farmers in developing countries to move towards larger scalecommercial production. It can create economic wealth, contribute to supply chain efficiency through the production of higher quantities of better quality products, and contribute to achieving domestic food security objectives. Maximizing these benefits while minimizing the inherent risks of contract farming is reliant upon the forging of an enabling environment, a key part of which is the domestic regulatory framework. This Legislative Study provides guidance to domestic regulators and other interested readers on how to appraise and potentially reform domestic regulatory frameworks to achieve responsible contract farming. Recognising that different countries and contextual realties may benefit from different regulatory solutions, this Study provides several examples, supported by representative case studies, on how contract farming can be regulated, without promoting a single solution as the most appropriate. Please visit FAO’s Contract Farming Resource Centre, http://www.fao.org/in-action/contract-farming/en/, which is a regularly updated website hosting a variety of material on contract farming both from FAO and from other recognized authors.

In many regions of the world and across various fields, the law has become a 'product.' Individuals and companies seek attractive legal regulations, while countries advertise their legal wares globally as they compete for customers. To analyze this development and to develop policy recommendations with respect to contract law and dispute resolution, a conference was held in Munich in October 2011, bringing together leading scholars from the US and Europe. This book contains the papers and main comments produced for the conference. The chapters include important papers on, inter alia, law and economic theory, legal transplants, theories of private law, choice of law, the characterization of contract law, and the US and English civil procedural traditions. The book is an important and useful study for an area of growing importance.