Enforcing Contracts: Should Courts Seek the Truth?

Claude Fluet

CIRANO Working Papers from CIRANO

Abstract: I examine the case where fulfillment of a contractual commitment is only imperfectly verifiable and ask whether the court should then "tell the truth"" regarding the action in dispute. I show that truth seeking does not maximize the expected surplus from contractual relationships. From the parties' viewpoint, the enforcer should disregard some of the available information and should sometimes rule in favor of one party, even though his understanding is that the other party is most probably right. The analysis provides a justification for rules of evidence in common law and for the use by courts of neutral normative priors regarding contending claims." J'analyse le cas où la réalisation d'un engagement contractuel n'est qu'imparfaitement vérifiable. La question posée est de savoir si le tribunal doit alors « dire le vrai » quant aux actions faisant l'objet d'un litige. Je montre que, du point de vue des contractants, la cour devrait faire abstraction d'une partie de l'information disponible et qu'elle devrait parfois statuer en faveur d'un des contractants, même si elle considère plus probable que l'autre ait raison. Cette analyse fournit une justification à certaines règles de procédure en droit civil et elle justifie le recours à des a priori normatifs neutres dans le règlement des différends.

Keywords: Adjudication; contract; enforcement; rules of evidence; standard of proof; value of information; Jugements de cour; exécution des contrats; règles de procédure; standard de preuve; valeur de l'information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cirano.qc.ca/files/publications/2002s-76.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Enforcing Contracts: Should Courts Seek the Truth? (2003)
Working Paper: Enforcing Contracts: Should Courts Seek the Truth? (2002)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cir:cirwor:2002s-76

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CIRANO Working Papers from CIRANO Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Webmaster ().