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 Lawat Rutgers School of Law‒Camden. He writes and teaches in contracts, insurancelaw, and torts. His books include Delay,Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can DoAbout ItLaw 101: Everything YouNeed to Know About American LawProfessional Liability to ThirdParties. His contracts scholarshipincludes articles on relational contract theory (“The Insurance Relationship as Relational Contractand 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 (“CriticalApproaches to Contract Law,” 30 UCLA Law Review 829 (1983)), and formation doctrine (“Is an Advertisement an Offer? Why It Is, and Why ItMatters,” 58 Hastings L.J. 61 (2006)). In the AALS, Feinman has served as chair of the Section onContracts and chair of the planning committee for the contracts conference. AtRutgers, he has served as Associate Dean and Acting Dean of the law school and amember of the Rutgers Center for Risk and Responsibility, and he has receivedevery 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 aprofessor at University of Washington School of Law. I have been teaching Contracts for about 15years. I started out, copying mycolleagues, by using the Dawson casebook. I had first encountered contracts asa student with a much earlier edition of the same book. I embarrassed to admit that I began teachingcontracts without much insight into the subject, and I can’t remember exactlywhen I first discovered Macaulay and relational contracts theory. I certainly had not encountered them in myown legal education, although my four years of commercial practice did perhapsmake me susceptible to their insights. But what a relief they were! Ihave been teaching from Macaulay, et al.,contracts: law in Action for manyyears 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]
