Reasonable Expectations and the Interpretation of Contracts Across Legal Traditions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is an increasing tendency to speak of reasonable expectations as a factor that should be taken into account when giving meaning to the terms of a contract. Some theorists even say it should become the new “golden key” of contractual interpretation. After summarizing the status of the doctrine of reasonable expectations in common law Canada, this article analyzes how the concept of reasonable expectations may help explain the interpretive practices of civil law judges in Quebec. While many contractual interpretation cases may be explained on that basis, the author shows that the duty to act in good faith, a central tenet of civil law systems, may constitute just as good an explanation. The author concludes that it is probably impossible to find a single overarching principle, be it intent, reasonable expectations or good faith, form which rules of interpretation may be deduced with any degree of precision.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".