Forthcoming Scholarship Responding to Kim Krawiec & Nate Oman

I posted a blog version of this response back in September. It has now gone through substantive edits and will be forthcoming in the Iowa Law Review Online soon. It hasn’t even gone officially live on SSRN yet because . . . reasons. Lately, my submissions to SSRN don’t go live until I ask them what the holdup is, and then it goes live almost immediately. The ways of the gods of SSRN are hidden to us. In any case, you can be the WORLD PREMIERE reader!

Anyway, the link is here, and here’s the abstract:

This brief response to The Case for Specific Performance of Personal Service Contracts by Kim Krawiec and Nate Oman builds on their suggestions for a limited expansion of the availability of the specific performance remedy in contracts for personal services. The response quickly reviews Professor Krawiec and Oman’s arguments and registers some skepticism as to the likelihood that parties would agree to specific performance as a remedy in the situations they discuss. They make the excellent point that a positive injunction can be a tool to bring about settlement. In addition, specific performance should also be available where the court can be confident that: (1) the party subject to such an order will perform to the best of their ability; and (2) the party that has to pay for such performance will not, if forced to pay, interfere with optimal performance.

I hope that my response will lead more people to have a look at Profssor Krawiec and Oman’s work also available on SSRN, The Case for Specific Performance of Personal Service Contracts,