Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of an award of damages for breach of contract is to place the promisee in as near a position as possible to that she would have occupied had the promisor performed his promises. This raises an interesting problem in cases where the contract permits the breaching promisor a degree of discretion as to how to perform. Consider a seller who breaches a promise to deliver 200 tons of goods, plus or minus five per cent. Or a theatre company that breaches a promise to provide an actor with an engagement at one of several theatres of varying quality and reputation, the choice of venue being left to the discretion of the company. Or an employer that wrongfully dismisses an employee who is entitled to a base salary plus such bonus, if any, that the employer shall from time to time determine. How are damages to be assessed in cases like these? According to Anglo-Canadian common law damages for breach of a contract with alternative performances are to be assessed by reference to the minimum of these alternatives. This minimum-performance principle precludes any inquiry into how the promisor would in fact have performed the contract had he not breached. It represents an exception to the basic principle of contract damages in cases where the party in breach had a choice between two or more modes of performing the contract. I argue that this exception is unjustifiable. A party to a contract is entitled upon breach to be placed in the position that she would have occupied had the contract not been breached. That position depends on how the breaching party would have performed his promises, and where this is not fully determined by the content of those promises then the court must speculate as to how the promisor would in fact have chosen to perform them. I argue that the minimum-performance principle typically does not affect the quantum of damages awarded, but that it ought nevertheless to be abandoned because it rests on a misunderstanding of the relationship between contractual rights and remedies and represents an untenable departure from the basic principle of compensation.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.005 |
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".