Transcript

The thing to understand about contracts is that litigation looks at a particular contract and talks about what should be done in the event of breach. And often that’s lost sight of if you just look at litigation because those are concerned with breaches between A and B and what we need to do is put that A-B contract into its larger social and business context. Somebody who’s thinking about contracts as a social institution has to look at a network of contracts and see how one contract builds and depends upon another. And in this particular framework, what is key is to make sure that each of the contracts is performed in the correct sequence so that if nothing goes off the rails, you can coordinate the activities of large numbers of people and modern management techniques were designed to achieve exactly that particular result. So if the people don’t put the foundations in correctly, the guys who are responsible for building the walls will not be able to do their work and if the guys who put the walls in are not able to do their work, the painters will not be able to do theirs and so on down the line. So the system of contract requires high levels of performance from soup to nuts. And there are oversight situations. There are architects who review these things; there are owners, supervisors of one sort or another. To make sure that the systems are in place, the backups are in order ah, so that you don’t get a disruption in production, because it’s not just the individual dispute that takes place with difficulty, it’s that all people are going to be engaged in work after this contract will now been slowed up.

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