Revisiting the Contracts Scholarship of Stewart Macaulay: The First Week's Contributors

We begin our online symposium inspired by Revisiting the Contracts Scholarship of Stewart Macaulay: On the Empirical and the Lyrical (Jean Braucher, John Kidwell, and William C. Whitford, eds., Hart Publishing 2013) with four posts next week. In addition to helping edit the book Jean Braucher has also been instrumental in recruiting participants and shaping this symposium.  So we at the blog are all very grateful to her.

This post will serve to introduce next week's guest bloggers.

Jay Feinman is Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law‒Camden. He writes and teaches in contracts, insurance law, and torts. His books include Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It;  Law 101: Everything You Need to Know About American Law; and Professional Liability to Third Parties. His contracts scholarship includes articles on relational contract theory (“The Insurance Relationship as Relational Contract and the ‘Fairly Debatable’ Rule for First-Party Bad Faith,” 46 San Diego L. Rev. (2009); “Relational Contract Theory in Context,” 94 Nw. U. L. Rev. 737 (1999), critical legal studies (“Critical Approaches to Contract Law,” 30 UCLA Law Review 829 (1983)), and formation doctrine (“Is an Advertisement an Offer? Why It Is, and Why It Matters,” 58 Hastings L.J. 61 (2006)). In the AALS, Feinman  has served as chair of the Section on Contracts and chair of the planning committee for the contracts conference. At Rutgers, he has served as Associate Dean and Acting Dean of the law school and a member of the Rutgers Center for Risk and Responsibility, and he has received every teaching prize awarded by the university.

Links to many of Professor Feinman's publications can be found here.

Alan Hyde is Distinguished Professor and Sidney Reitman Scholar at Rutgers University School of Law, Newark, where he writes mostly about labor, employment, and immigration law.  He is a member of the American Law Institute and consultant to the Restatement of Employment Law.  He also teaches contracts and discusses contracts in his books Bodies of Law (1997), Working in Silicon Valley (2003), and articles on covenants not to compete and employment contracts that contracts teachers do not read.

Links to many of Professor Hydes publications can be found here.

Kate O'Neill's principal interests are contracts, copyright, legal rhetoric, and law school teaching.  She shares the following biographical details:

I am a professor at University of Washington School of Law.  I have been teaching Contracts for about 15 years.  I started out, copying my colleagues, by using the Dawson casebook. I had first encountered contracts as a student with a much earlier edition of the same book.  I embarrassed to admit that I began teaching contracts without much insight into the subject, and I can’t remember exactly when I first discovered Macaulay and relational contracts theory.  I certainly had not encountered them in my own legal education, although my four years of commercial practice did perhaps make me susceptible to their insights.  But what a relief they were!  I have been teaching from Macaulay, et al., contracts: law in Action for many years now.

If you are interested in why we teach contracts as most of us do, you might enjoy a piece I wrote about Richard Posner’s effect on casebooks and law teaching.  Rhetoric Counts: What We Should Teach When We Teach Posner, 39 Seton Hall L. Rev. 507 (2009).   

Links to many of Professor O'Neill's publications can be found here.

Deborah Post is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Faculty Development and Professor of Law at Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center. She began her legal career working in the corporate section of a law firm in Houston, Texas, Bracewell & Patterson, now renamed Bracewell & Guiliani. She left practice to teach at the University of Houston Law School and moved to New York to Touro Law Center in 1987. She has been a visiting professor at Syracuse Law School, DePaul Law School, and State University of New Jersey Rutgers School of Law Newark. She also has taught as an adjunct at Hofstra Law School, UMass Dartmouth and St. Johns University School of Law. Professor Post has written for and about legal education. Among her most notable publications are a book on legal education, Cultivating Intelligence: Power, Law and the Politics of Teaching written with a colleague, Louise Harmon and a casebook in Contract, Contracting Law, with co-authors Amy Kastely and Nancy Ota. She has been a member of the Society of American Law Teachers Board of Governors for ten years and was co-president of that organization with Professor Margaret Barry from 2008-2010.

Links to many of Professor Post's publications can be found here.

We look forward to an engaging first round of posts.

[JT]