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As for Quark`s mother who tied him to a contract he wasn`t involved in, I`m pretty sure it was happening in Victorian Britain. Women were not legally considered competent adults and therefore could not assume their own debts, any debt they accumulated was in their husband`s name (even if their husbands were not with them). The economic impact of this situation is that contracting parties sometimes have to absorb irrational losses on the basis of these contracts. In the Ferengi Alliance, you owe an annual rent to a landlord who owned a building that burned down on the first day of your lease. This obviously seems irrational to me, but hey, the Ferengi are hypercapitarians in terms of freedom to contract, right? Or are they. In your example of a strategic breach of a contract for the purchase of goods, if the seller violates, the common law rule in effect is that the buyer can purchase spare parts at the time of the breach, and the infringing seller is liable for the difference in cost. This prevents this type of effective/strategic breach from being a viable option. The latter clause is a “lump sum compensation” clause. It creates additional sanctions for injured parties in order to avoid exactly the circumstances I am describing, but also to protect both parties. If suddenly the price of rod screws drops to $0.01 per gross, the customer has a great incentive to violate the company. In this way, you protect the parties` contracts from market conditions by means of a lump sum damages clause. Again, exaggerate your point of view – Ferengi contract law simply has no protection for non-Ferengi.

I have a question on point 3. Is it true that anyone can be liable for a contract with a third party, or only in this case, because she was his mother? But in the Ferengi Company (before the creation of the Congress of Economic Consultants in 2375), not only is it absolutely forbidden for workers to conclude such contracts, but it is also absolutely forbidden for employers to negotiate with them. In “Bar Association”, Quark faces the complete destruction of his company by the Ferengi Commerce Authority for daring to parry with the Union of Rome. According to the hypercapitalist model, Quark and Rome should have the freedom to enter into more or less any contract they want, but under the Ferengi Law, this freedom is strangely limited not only to workers, but also to their employers. It is actually closer to Chinese trade law than to Western law; In China, basically a socialist country, trying to unionize is a criminal offense, and negotiations with a collective of workers are punishable by both massive fines and criminal penalties. In short, in this regard, the supposedly hypercapitalist market economy of the ferengi is actually not so free. It might be useful to distinguish two related concepts that I mentioned together earlier: strategic violation and effective violation. A strategic breach is a breach from which one of the parties would benefit more than the performance of the contract. An effective violation is one that results in the most efficient overall use of resources. A strategic breach that yields more profits to the injured party than losses to the injured party is a socially beneficial violation and can be made equitable by holding the injured party liable for the injured party`s losses. Therefore, punitive damages clauses are not enforced; in many cases, they would prevent effective infringements. And a little point about the Canon of Star Trek: Quark`s responsibility for his mother`s contract wasn`t really a matter of contract law.

It was more like what we would call the criminal law. This was a very serious violation of the Ferengi Act, which could be punished with severe fines, imprisonment, professional prohibition and a number of other clearly punitive measures if a woman entered into a contract. It certainly appeared that the charges came from ferengi state, not from a private party invoking a breach of contract. A law under which family members are legally responsible for investigating and reporting potential illegal business transactions of their loved ones is certainly incompatible with our legal system, but I am not sure that this is proof that a third party can be arbitrarily party to a contract that they have not signed. 1. There is no doctrine of impossibility in Ferengian law. Episode: “Body Parts”. In contract law in rem, it is a defence against non-performance of the terms of the contract to successfully argue that performance of the contract has actually been rendered impossible because a basic assumption underlying the contract has proved to be false. Suppose you sign a contract to rent an apartment, but when you actually live in the apartment, you find that the building has burned down and is completely uninhabitable. Under actual contract law, you would be exempt from having to pay rent for the unit, since a basic assumption underlying a lease is that there is actually a building for rent and that assumption was not wrong through anyone`s fault. But according to the Ferengi law, this doctrine does not seem to exist.

Quark, believing in good faith that his death is imminent, signs a contract to sell his vacuum-dried remains to liquidator Brunt for a bounty. .