Contracts Meet Henry Ford

Barak D Richman
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引用次数: 3

Abstract

Legal scholars and legal educators view contracts as a welfare-maximizing (or optimal risk-allocating) device for two or more parties. Because we cling to this principal-driven paradigm, we think of lawyers only as the proverbial “transaction cost engineers,” the loyal agents of parties to a transaction. And whenever we observe contracts that appear to be suboptimal, we blame agency costs. We instead should apply the literature on organizational economics to understand the production of contracts by the modern law firm. This literature better illustrates how law firms organize, why they produce the products they do, and why those products sometimes exhibit strangely inefficient features. These inefficiencies are not the consequence of agency costs or a lack of attorneys’ fidelity to their clients; they instead illustrate the limits — and, indirectly, the strengths — of large organizations. Indeed, observing that legal products do not perfectly match contemporary needs might be no less provocative than observing that Detroit is long overdue to produce high-mileage cars.
合同会见亨利·福特
法律学者和法律教育者将合同视为两方或多方福利最大化(或最佳风险分配)的工具。因为我们坚持这种原则驱动的范式,我们认为律师只是众所周知的“交易成本工程师”,是交易各方的忠实代理人。每当我们观察到合同似乎不是最优的时候,我们就会责怪代理成本。相反,我们应该运用组织经济学的文献来理解现代律师事务所的合同生产。这些文献更好地说明了律师事务所是如何组织的,为什么他们生产他们所做的产品,以及为什么这些产品有时会表现出奇怪的低效特征。这些低效率不是代理成本或律师对客户缺乏忠诚的结果;相反,它们说明了大型组织的局限性,也间接说明了它们的优势。事实上,观察到合法产品不能完全满足当代需求,可能与观察到底特律早就应该生产高里程汽车一样具有挑衅性。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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