Policy, Politics and Aesthetics in Non-American Private Law: A Comparative Study of Contract Performance Interruption
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In the United States, it is widely accepted that ‘policy,’ meaning conflicting societal values and interests that can be weighed, plays an important role in private law reasoning. However, in many other polities, including France, England, Quebec and English Canada which this article scrutinizes, the role of policy in private law is either strenuously denied or reduced to an exceptional consideration of social concerns under residual doctrines like good faith, abuse of right or unconscionability. As a result, full-blown and routine invocations of policy are still considered to be an exotic American feature and to be absent from these systems. In this article, I refute this persisting view and show that such policy arguments are as a matter of fact relied on by authoritative actors in France, England, Quebec and English Canada. Taking interruption of contractual performance following breach as a case study, I rely on cases and treatises from these four jurisdictions to produce an integrated repertoire of policy arguments that have been invoked for a series of related contract law questions. I thus provide the basis for the application of American private law insights in legal systems where they have largely been ignored. I suggest that there are important political and aesthetic stakes to this jurisprudential transplantation, in that it allows for innovative forms of contestation of marketbased normative reasoning and of the traditional professional styles adopted by non- American jurists.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".