Generative Gap Filling
Most contract litigation turns on contracts that imperfectly record parties' bargains. When the parties' dispute can't be solved by interpreting the text, courts fill the gap. Scholars have long assumed that the remaining text runs out quickly, and provides thin evidence of the actual deal on the disputed point. On that view, a judge who supplies the missing term must be drawing on something else, from commercial defaults to her own policy preferences. Despite generations of work, courts have no real alternative to such unruly methods. We tested that assumption. Taking real contracts, we masked a term the parties had negotiated and asked readers to predict what we removed. Lay respondents...
| Authors | Yonathan A. Arbel, David A. Hoffman |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 7 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 August 2026 |
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