Keynote Address: Modern Supply Chains and Outmoded Contract Law

Abstract

These remarks were delivered at the American University Law Review's Annual Symposium entitled "New Perspectives: A Discussion on Modern Global Supply Chains" on January 25, 2019.

Thank you, Nick, for the introduction and for inviting me to speak. I am grateful to talk at the American University Law Review's Annual Symposium, particularly because it is such a well put together and thoughtful symposium. This is evident from the scheduled panels for later today and for those that happened this morning. It is great to talk to such a distinguished and very large audience.

A subject of this conference is supply chain management. Thus, I thought it would be apt to talk about supply chain management. This is a subject that initially seems very close to the ground for theoretically-oriented lawyers and professors, but it turns out that supply chain management, in its various forms, has attracted a lot of attention recently from contract theorists and applied economists, as well as from business people.

So, unusually for me, I will talk about a hot topic. The question I will ask, put broadly, is: What roles can contract law and actual contracting behavior play in improving the efficiency of the modern supply chain? While I am giving a "current events" talk, I am also going to link my thoughts to commercial patterns of the past. My topic also raises a question about lawyers: What role can lawyers now play, and what role did they once play, in supply chain management?