How to Do Things with Contracts: A Transactional Perspective
Date of Event
11-11-2025
Description
For some years now, Professor Avery Katz has taught first-year contracts from a client-centered perspective that emphasizes how the rules of contract law can be used to promote the purposes of individuals conducting their personal and business affairs, as opposed to a court-centered perspective that emphasizes how these rules are likely to be applied in litigated disputes.
Many teachers include references to contractual planning, of course, in the course of discussing published cases or of black-letter doctrine. For example, while discussing a case in which a promise is held unenforceable due to lack of consideration, a teacher might ask whether and how the promise could be recast to be enforceable next time around. But in Professor Katz’s experience, most 1L teachers undertake such discussions only occasionally, instead spending the bulk of their time on how and why litigated cases come out the way they do, and on how not-yet-litigated hypothetical cases are likely to come out, should they ever get to court.
In this lecture, and in the book project on which it is based, Professor Katz will argue that the 1L contracts curriculum should be organized around forward-looking transactional planning, and provide a model for doing that across the entire doctrinal range of the subject.
Subject Headings
contracts; transactional contracts
Location
Moot Court Room (A67)
Document Type
Video
Recommended Citation
Katz, Avery, "How to Do Things with Contracts: A Transactional Perspective" (2025). Conferences and Symposia. 1124.
https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/law_videos_general/1124