When Money Grew on Trees: Lucy v. Zehmer and Contracting in a Boom Market

This Article revisits Lucy v. Zehmer, a 1950s Virginia Supreme Court ruling that has become a staple in most contracts courses in American law schools. The colorful facts are well known to nearly all law students: Lucy and Zehmer met one evening in December 1952 at a restaurant in Dinwiddie, Virginia, and, following several drinks and much verbal banter, Zehmer wrote a contract on a restaurant bill, in which he agreed to sell his farm to Lucy for $50,000. Zehmer later insisted that he had been intoxicated and had thought the entire matter was a joke. He testified that he had been high as a Georgia pine and merely bluffing to try to get Lucy to admit that he did not actually have$50,000. Upholding the contract, the court ruled that regardless of Zehmer’s intent, his outward behavior could reasonably be construed to suggest that he had been serious. The court thus invoked what is known as the objective theory of contract formation. Our findings suggest that the court misinterpreted the contractual setting surrounding that December evening in 1952. Our research uncovers several discoveries: (1) Lucy, acting as a middleman for southern Virginia’s burgeoning pulp-and-paper industry, sought the Ferguson farm for its rich timber reserves; (2) Lucy was one of scores of aggressive timber middlemen in the region who eagerly sought valuable timberland and prompted a chaotic landgrab, leaving a wake of shady transactions and colorful litigation; and (3) within eight years of winning injunctive relief from the Virginia Supreme Court and purchasing the Ferguson farm from Zehmer for $50,000, Lucy earned approximately$142,000 from selling the land and its natural resources. These findings call into question the court’s assertion that $50,000 was a fair price, its conclusion that Zehmer’s actions indicated contractual intent, and its confidence that the objective method captured the relevant background in which Lucy’s and Zehmer\u27s exchange took place. More generally, these findings suggest that conclusions reached by the objective method are highly dependent on both the facts that are retold and the context in which those facts occurred, and that historical analysis can meaningfully illustrate the limits of legal doctrines

The plus nines of climate change

Poetry by Lucy Burnet

Lucy + Jorge Orta: food water life

Bringing together three of Orta's most important bodies of work, Lucy+Jorge Orta:Food Water Life addresses universal concerns of community, shelter, migration, and sustainable development. Beyond merely tackling these issues artistically, the work of contemporary artist Lucy Orta and her partner Jorge Orta suggests solutions by modeling fresh approaches to social dilemmas. From reclaiming discarded food for town-wide dinner celebrations to staging an international exhibition in Antarctica, their often-playful projects incorporate elements of fashion, art, and architecture, which they combine with performances, multimedia events, and public debates. Featuring hundreds of photographs of recent works, Lucy+Jorge Orta: Food Water Life includes texts by curators Zoë Ryan, Ellen Lupton, Judith Hoos Fox, and Ginger Gregg Duggan and an interview by critic Hou Hanru that provides insights into the artists’ processes and motivations

Veggies 4U's Energy Pricing Dilemma

Veggies 4U is a young and dynamic family-run greenhouse: Lucy and her husband run the business with the help of a small group of friends and colleagues who serve on the company's Board of Directors. Lucy is preparing a report to the Board to recommend a natural gas supply contract for the next three years. The company has received four different contract offers, ranging from a simple forward contract, to a maximum cost contract with a price floor. The case focuses on the pricing and risk management opportunities offered by an integrated North American natural gas market. Lucy has to assess the different supply contract offers received by the company and to reverse engineer them in order to benchmark their cost with that of potential synthetic alternatives Veggies 4U could build. Once Lucy has decided what to recommend, she has to sell it to the Board.Energy price risk, Natural gas supply contract, Financial engineering, Risk, Demand and Price Analysis, Risk and Uncertainty,

Haunted childhood in Charlotte Bronte's Villette

In Villette, the obvious fakeness of the phantom robs it of uncanny status, reducing it to a form of narrative decoy which deflects attention away from what are consistently described as unheimlich in the novel: children and childhood. Though Lucy Snowe's own childhood past is shrouded in mist, an Object Relations reading reveals the souvenir value she attributes, instead, to domestic furniture and fittings, themselves operating as phantoms giving shape to an otherwise formless sense of loss. Ultimately, as the novel's ending shows, this superficially consolatory mechanism simply ensnares the adult Lucy in an ongoing false self-image: the abandoned child

The Heterogeneity, Distribution, and Environmental Associations of Borrelia burgdorferi Sensu Lato, the Agent of Lyme Borreliosis, in Scotland

Genospecies controls were obtained from the laboratory of Dr. Muriel Cornet at the Institut Pasteur, Paris. We thank Bob Furness for collecting ticks from passerine birds, Steph Vollmer for processing the samples from one site, E. Packer, A. Wiebe, J. Low, E. Stephen, and J. Arthur for help collecting ticks, Kenny Raey for laboratory assistance, and Jackie Potts for statistical advice. Marianne C. James was funded by a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) Doctoral Training Grant with CASE support from the Macaulay Development Trust awarded to Alan S. Bowman and Lucy Gilbert. Lucy Gilbert was supported by the Scottish Government’s Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division (RESAS).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Lucy + Jorge Orta, Potential Architecture

Cells are a part of the human body; they are at the origin of its being, its feelings, its emotions, and its sufferings. Thus, they speak the language of the body. There are also cells of habitation. The relationship between people and their habitat is formed in this metaphorical cell. Living and being become a single and unique life experience. Cristina Morozzi Potential Architecture explores artists Lucy + Jorge Orta’s recent architectural endeavors that derive from their fascination with cell biology and the process of differentiation. Through drawings and sculpture, the artists conceptualize the communication process the human cell undertakes from its embryonic state, and the infinite transformations that lead to defined structural organisms. This new body of work draws from Lucy + Jorge Orta’s artistic practice, grounded in the universal concerns of community, shelter, migration, and sustainable development. Potential Architecture is a powerful rejoinder to the arbitrary boundaries that define art, architecture, and design