2021 Contracts Year in Review

Not all contracts developments can be easily tracked on a blog.  But here are ten top stories that we covered last year that will stay with us: 

10: Scarlett Johansson’s short-lived suit against Disney/Marvel connected to the release of Black Widow.  The suit settled, leaving its mysteries unresolved.

9: The latest Suez Crisis and the potential contract disputes arising out of the Ever Given incident.

8: Fun with Terms of Service in the context of Robinhood putting a damper on the GameStop caper.

7: The Trump campaign’s manipulation of the tools of libertarian paternalism to get Trump supporters to sign up for recurring donations to the campaign, resulted in unprecedented levels of complaints of fraud in connection with the solicitation of political donations.

6: A $300 million proofreading error that has also led to malpractice claims against the law firms involved.

5. Two huge Wood v. Boynton-style cases in one year, starting with a Ming-dynasty bowl and ending with an Albrecht Dürer drawing, both sold by unwitting sellers for a tiny fraction of their value.

4: Texas Lieutenant Governor Republican Dan Patrick’s unilateral offer to pay any person who brought him evidence of voter fraud in connection with the 2020 election and his pay-out to a Pennsylvania Democrat who uncovered evidence of a Republican who tried to vote twice.

3: A year of conceptual art conundrums, including invisible sculptures, and the take the money and run piece, about which we also blogged here, with NFTs lurking in the background throughout the year.

2: Citibank’s $900 million error.

And . . . the most important development from our perspective was. . . .

1: Another year of collaboration with our amazing contributing editors, Mark Edwin Burge, Sidney DeLong, and Nancy Kim, as well as with guest bloggers, including Yonathan Arbel, together with Andrew Toler on one piece and Samuel Becher on another, Charles Calleros, Meirav Furth-Matzkin and Yuval Feldman, together with Samuel Becher (again!), Farshad Ghodoosi, Jonathan Harris, David L. Noll and Zachary Clopton, Tanya Monestier, Ohad Somech, Marissa Jackson Sow, and  Alan White.  In addition, we were aided in our endeavors by research assistants Alyssa Cross and Sydney Scott.

We hope that the new year brings more fruitful collaborations, and please, please, if you are an academic writing and thinking about contracts, consider posting as guest blogger here.  Your thoughts would be a welcome addition to our feed!