Judge-Made Contracts: Reconstructing Unconscionable Contracts
Although unconscionability is thought to be a nearly exhausted topic, there are still some disputed issues regarding its remedies. This paper discusses one of these issues, namely the judicial reconstruction of unconscionable contracts or unreasonable contract clauses. More concretely, in many legal systems the judge is granted, at least in some cases, the power to revise the terms of unconscionable contracts: he may substitute "reasonable" terms for the "unreasonable" ones so that the contract remains valid. Nevertheless, an attempt by the judge to adjust an "unreasonable" term will create opportunism from both sides and will lead to arbitrary judicial decisions, thus upsetting the security of transactions and inevitably leading to higher transaction costs. Hence we argue that, with a few exceptions pertaining to monopoly or collusion situations, the judge should only decide between enforceability and non-enforceability of the contract or the clause. If the parties want their void contract to be enforced they can always renegotiate after the court decision and modify it themselves.
Duress in Contracts: An Economic Analysis
This paper is forthcoming as a chapter in Contract Law and Economics, ed. Gerrit de Geest (Cheltenham: Elgar 2009) [Elgar Encyclopedia of Law and Economics 2nd ed.] and its goal is to provide an overview of the economic analyses of contractual duress. The focus is on distinctive features of the economic perspective on the duress doctrine, as developed in the theoretical literature of law and economics. Before discussing the results of economic analysis, the legal background and some non-economic theories of duress are briefly presented.
Conception of a Language Learning Environment Based on the Communicative and Actional Approaches
This paper's aim is to give a conceptual framework about the conception of a Computer Assisted Language Learning environment based on the communicative and actional approaches. In this environment, the learner is implicated in a task that he/she has to complete by interacting with a partner using his/her language competencies. Given a task, different ways exist to accomplish it and the different competencies of the learner can then be solicited with different types of interaction. Works accomplished in human computer dialogue give models to manage this interaction.