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Risk allocation in government contract performance is a key issue for both economic analysis and legal doctrine. However, one factor restraining the dialogue between law and economics (in France at least) is that, while economics develops normative and pure theories of optimal risk allocation patterns, legal scholars focus on pure doctrinal analysis of administrative court rulings. This paper tackles this issue through an empirical analysis of French administrative contract law. It starts with the idea that it would be an error to consider that legal rules incorporate an economic theory of risk allocation. However, this does not prevent positive contract administrative law to frame a pattern of risk allocation in the course on contract performance. To discover how this framework operates, we must take into account the diversity of rules, legal provisions, and case law rulings that apply to such contracts. The paper therefore focuses on the following issues: standard contractual conditions, administrative court rulings in contract litigation and unpredictable factors, and opinions by the specialized commissions on markets. We argue that contrary to the economic analysis view, no single optimal pattern of risk allocation can in practice be set up. What the public authorities and administrative courts must manage is to frame the least imperfect pattern of risk allocation possible because of the need to reach some kind of compromise between several constraints, namely that firms should not have incentives to factor in exaggerated risk premiums in setting prices, financial managers should not allow cost overruns to occur systematically, the government should not compromise the delivery of work by the contractor, the funding of contracts by the State should be secure, and so on. However, rulings by the highest administrative courts, including Administrative Appellate Courts and the State Council ( Conseil d'Etat) do not provide clear and explicit patterns of risk allocation as decisions are taken on a case-by-case basis. An empirical analysis shows the absence of correlation between the facts that lead to litigation over contracts and the rulings of administrative courts. It also reveals that the standard of disruption to the economics of contracts is applied to litigious contracts without considering the characteristics of the firms (size, financial capacity, etc.). We argue that improvements in the way public authorities deal with the risk issue are possible. The government should use contracts with incentive provisions and results commitments by the contractor. It should also reform the regulation of price adaptations to changes in economic conditions in using output rather than input indexes.