Korobkin on Walker-Thomas

As part of our efforts to highlight interesting contracts scholarship that came along before we got around to starting this blog, check out A 'Traditional' and 'Behavioral' Law-and-Economics Analysis of Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Company, by Russell Korobkin (UCLA).  If you attended the 2004 AALS annual meeting you heard the synopsis, but the whole thing is worth reading.  Here’s the abstract:

Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Company is a casebook favorite, taught in virtually every first-year Contract Law class. In the case, the D.C. Circuit holds that courts have the power to deny enforcement of contract terms if the terms are "unconscionable," and it remands the case to the lower court to consider whether the facts of the case meet this standard. This article, written for a session of the 2004 AALS Annual Meeting sponsored by the Contracts Section, analyzes the question that the D.C. Circuit posed to the lower court in Williams -- and that Contracts teachers routinely pose to their students -- from a "traditional" law-and-economics perspective, and from a "behavioral" law-and-economics perspective.

[Frank Snyder]