TY - JOUR AU - Kornhauser, Lewis A AU - MacLeod, W. Bentley TI - Contracts between Legal Persons JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 16049 PY - 2010 Y2 - June 2010 DO - 10.3386/w16049 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16049 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16049.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Lewis A. Kornhauser New York University School of Law 40 Washington Square South, 314E New York, NY 10012 E-Mail: lewis.kornhauser@nyu.edu W. Bentley MacLeod Department of Economics Columbia University 420 West 118th Street, MC 3308 New York, NY 10027 Tel: 310-571-5083 Fax: 212/854-4782 E-Mail: bentley.macleod@columbia.edu AB - Contract law and the economics of contract have, for the most part, developed independently of each other. In this essay, we briefly review the notion of a contract from the perspective of lawyer, and then use this framework to organize the economics literature on contract. The review thus provides an overview of the literature for economists who are interested in exploring the economic implications of contract law. The title, Contracts between Legal Persons, limits the review to that part of contract law that is generic to any legal person. A legal person is any individual, firm or government agency with the right to enter into binding agreements. Our goal is to discuss the role of the law in enforcing these agreements under the hypothesis that the legal persons have well defined goals and objectives. ER -