Bibliographic record
Abstract
Under the donative promise principle, an unrelied-upon promise to make a gift is unenforceable in contract. Commentators worry that enforcement would taint donative relationships by obscuring the promisor’s motive, leaving it unclear whether the gift was ultimately given out of, for example, friendship, or from fear of legal sanctions. This article argues that courts should abandon the donative promise principle and enforce a variety of donative promises even in the absence of reliance. The principle creates doctrinally and morally perverse incentives to rely on the promise by conforming to promisor attempts at undue influence. Meanwhile, people who are too poor to change their circumstances in reliance on donative promises are left dependent on the whim of promisors for basic goods and services. The specter of enforcement need not obscure promisors’ motives, at least not any more so than criminal sanctions might obscure people’s motives for stopping their cars at crosswalks or taking care of children. Indeed, enforcement could enhance the authenticity of donative relationships by mitigating the risk that the promised gift will be perceived as a carrot to conform to the promisor’s wishes. Enforcement could also facilitate trust by obviating reasons to strategically overinvest in the promise and create contingency plans. But donative promises are not homogenous. Gift giving occurs within a variety of social settings characterized by different power dynamics and moral values, some of which may be ill-served by contract principles. This article closes by discussing one such case: volunteer work.
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 | 0.020 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| 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".