It recently cleared a hurdle when a court upheld a contract with National Grid for purchase of half its electricity.
An arbitrator upheld a contract clause allowing the Cincinnati Bengals to take away all or part of a player's signing bonus if he publicly criticizes team officials, coaches or teammates.
In the other, a court upheld a contract assigning future patents to the Duke tobacco companies of North Carolina.
Still, these moves were necessary actions to satisfy explicit and implicit agreements–either protecting margins or upholding a corporate contract.
And if one test of Europeanness is a mutual desire to build and uphold a social contract - a line I have been advocating - then the Ukraine, Belarus and even Russia pass the test with flying colours.
While this has been the state's policy since 1872, the law recently came into question in the case of Edwards II v. Arthur Andersen LLP, in which the accounting firm tried to uphold a noncompete contract Edwards signed in 1997.
792, 795, 84 L.Ed. 1061, the Court took into account still another consideration in upholding a state law against a Contract Clause attack: the petitioner had "purchased into an enterprise already regulated in the particular to which he now objects". See also El Paso v. Simmons, 379 U.S. 497, 85 S.Ct.
231, 78 L.Ed. 413, the Court upheld against a Contract Clause attack a mortgage moratorium law that Minnesota had enacted to provide relief for homeowners threatened with foreclosure.
In 1908, Louis Brandeis's brief on behalf of the state of Oregon had helped persuade the Supreme Court to abandon the constitutionally dubious theory of "liberty of contract," and uphold a law limiting the number of hours that women could work.
Judges have also cited one of the most fundamental principles of contract law to uphold the clauses: A contract, once signed, is binding.
