The acceleration dilemma: can English law accommodate constructive acceleration?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose – The aim of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that a contractor is entitled to payment for “constructive” acceleration implemented to avoid liquidated damages when denied a warranted time extension request by the employer or certifier under an English law construction contract. This claim is recognised in the US legal system, but not elsewhere. Design/methodology/approach – This paper adopts a “black letter” approach to reviewing the claim of constructive acceleration within the context of English and Commonwealth case law, from the perspective of a claimant contractor. Findings – The research presented in this paper concludes that whilst claims for constructive acceleration are unlikely to succeed in an English court on the basis of US law, a claim might be supportable on more orthodox common law grounds. These include implied instructions under the contract, breach of the contract based on the employer or certifier’s failure to operate the contract, mitigation of damages, unjust enrichment and tortious intimidation. Research limitations/implications – The focus of this paper is placed on English, Unites States, Canadian and Australasian case law. Practical implications – The range of potential legal grounds for constructive acceleration examined in this paper provides a toolkit for practitioners preparing to make or defend constructive acceleration claims. This paper also bring more clarity to a potential legal problem faced by practitioners in circumstances of significant tension and limited time. Originality/value – This paper provides a useful information source for practitioners faced with the prospect of advancing or defending constructive acceleration claims, and it provides a foundation for future related studies examining a wider scope of jurisdictions.
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 | 0.058 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".