Rethinking Mistake and Nondisclosure in Contract Law

This Article reconsiders the analysis of the disclosure/nondisclosure issue. Part I of this Article elaborates on the basic model and some of the complexities of identifying the actual impact of nondisclosure. Part II details the social costs of the default nondisclosure rule. In Part III, a case is made that concepts like mistake and defect, both patent and latent, unnecessarily retard allocative efficiency by limiting what must be disclosed. In Part IV, alternatives to the default nondisclosure rule are examined in the context of several cases, some of which have been used to illustrate the virtues of the default rule