The New Thing in Contract Research - The Contract Production Process

Cathy Hwang and Matt Jennejohn, two of the brightest young stars of the contract world, just put up a paper summarizing their view of one of the exciting new directions that contract research is taking. They describe it as the study of contractual complexity ("The New Research on Contractual Complexity", is their title). But I don't like the term "contractual complexity" at all, since I simply cannot take seriously the idea that anything that lawyers do is all that complex.  Convoluted, confused and obscure, yes.  But complex? Hell no.  What I see their wonderful paper as being about it the new research on the production of contracts.  As they point out, it all starts from the foundations laid in a set of important papers by the brilliant Barak Richman.  My sense is that Barak has long been puzzled as to why contract scholars have long had little interest in how contracts are produced -- even though key assumptions about the production process form the backbone for theories and doctrines of contract interpretation (something that contract scholars, old and new, do care deeply about).

And now we have an entire cool new set of papers by folks like Rob Anderson, Jeff Manns, Dave Hoffman, Tess-Wilkinson Ryan, Michelle Boardman, Julian Nyarko, John Coyle, Mark Weidemaier, Adam Badawi, Elisabeth de Fontenay, Anna Gelpern and, of course, Cathy and Matt (and more).  Some using fancy empirical techniques well beyond my capacity (yes, those are complex), others use cool experiments (again, complex) and still others use interviews (yup, complex).

Three cheers for the study of how contracts are produced -- complex ones, confused ones and all the rest.

The ssrn link to Cathy and Matt's paper from the Capital Markets Law Journal is here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3748100

Their abstract reads:

In the last few years, the academic literature has begun catching up with private practice. In this essay, we review the growing literature on contractual complexity and outline its key insights for contract design and enforcement. Our purview is broad, capturing new theories and new empirical tools that have recently been developed to understand contractual complexity. We also propose avenues for future research, which we extend as an invitation to academics and practitioners as an opportunity to further the collective knowledge in this field.