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What Do Consumers Understand About Predispute Arbitration Agreements? An Empirical Investigation, Roseanna Sommers
What Do Consumers Understand About Predispute Arbitration Agreements? An Empirical Investigation, Roseanna Sommers
Articles
The results of a survey of 1,071 adults in the United States reveal that most consumers do not pay attention to, let alone understand, arbitration clauses in their everyday lives. The vast majority of survey respondents (over 97%) report having opened an account with a company that requires disputes to be submitted to binding arbitration (e.g., Netflix, Hulu, Cash App, a phone or cable company), yet most are unaware that they have, in fact, agreed to mandatory arbitration (also known as “forced arbitration”). Indeed, over 99% of respondents who think they have never entered into an arbitration agreement likely have …
Consent Searches And Underestimation Of Compliance: Robustness To Type Of Search, Consequences Of Search, And Demographic Sample, Roseanna Sommers, Vanessa K. Bohns
Consent Searches And Underestimation Of Compliance: Robustness To Type Of Search, Consequences Of Search, And Demographic Sample, Roseanna Sommers, Vanessa K. Bohns
Articles
Most police searches today are authorized by citizens' consent, rather than probable cause or reasonable suspicion. The main constitutional limitation on so-called “consent searches” is the voluntariness test: whether a reasonable person would have felt free to refuse the officer's request to conduct the search. We investigate whether this legal inquiry is subject to a systematic bias whereby uninvolved decision-makers overstate the voluntariness of consent and underestimate the psychological pressure individuals feel to comply. We find evidence for a robust bias extending to requests, tasks, and populations that have not been examined previously. Across three pre-registered experiments, we approached participants …
Contract Schemas, Roseanna Sommers
Contract Schemas, Roseanna Sommers
Articles
This review draws on the notion of “contract schemas” to characterize what ordinary people think is happening when they enter into contractual arrangements. It proposes that contracts are schematically represented as written documents filled with impenetrable text containing hidden strings, which are routinely signed without comprehension. This cognitive template, activated whenever people encounter objects with these characteristic features, confers certain default assumptions, associations, and expectancies. A review of the literature suggests that contract schemas supply (a) the assumption that terms will be enforced as written, (b) the feeling that one is obligated to perform, and (c) the sense that one …
Consent, Coercion, And Employment Law, Samuel R. Bagenstos
Consent, Coercion, And Employment Law, Samuel R. Bagenstos
Articles
The Roberts Court has recently handed several high-profile wins in labor and employment law cases to anti-labor and pro-employer forces. This paper argues that those decisions replicate crucial moves made by some infamous Lochner-era cases — and that those same moves continue to underlie key elements of labor and employment doctrine more generally. In particular, these decisions rest on a contestable understanding of free worker choice. This paper begins by examining the key recent Roberts Court decisions and demonstrates that they appear to invoke at least two distinct and conflicting understandings of employee and employer choice. It then turns to …
Commonsense Consent, Roseanna Sommers
Commonsense Consent, Roseanna Sommers
Articles
Consent is a bedrock principle in democratic society and a primary means through which our law expresses its commitment to individual liberty. While there seems to be broad consensus that consent is important, little is known about what people think consent is. This Article undertakes an empirical investigation of people’s ordinary intuitions about when consent has been granted. Using techniques from moral psychology and experimental philosophy, it advances the core claim that most laypeople think consent is compatible with fraud, contradicting prevailing normative theories of consent. This empirical phenomenon is observed across over two dozen scenariosspanning numerous contexts in which …
Search Me?, John Burkoff
Search Me?, John Burkoff
Articles
Professor Burkoff contends that most people who purportedly "consent" to searches by law enforcement officers are not really - freely and voluntarily, as the Supreme Court decisional law supposedly requires - consenting to such searches. Yet, absent unusual circumstances, the great likelihood is that a court nonetheless will conclude that such consent was valid and any evidence seized admissible under the Fourth Amendment. Professor Burkoff argues, however, that the Supreme Court's 2006 decision in Georgia v. Randolph now dictates that the application of consent law doctrine should reflect the actual voluntariness (or involuntariness) of the questioned consents that come before …
Conceiving Nonmarital Fathers' Rights: An Inquiry Into The Constitutionality Of West Virginia's Adoption Statute, Lisa Kelly
Articles
When do the rights of nonmarital fathers to their children quicken? Is it only upon the father's establishment of a substantial economic and emotional relationship with his child? Do such fathers' interests gel only after the ink has dried on an order or affidavit in which paternity is established or acknowledged? Do there fundamental rights lie inchoate in the beating hearts of the newborn or gestating child? How should the law regard the role of the nonmarital father in the adoption context? Should there be one standard for all or two-one for fathers of infants and another for fathers or …
Testing Testing, Carl E. Schneider
Testing Testing, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
Last year, Congress passed the Ryan White Care Act Amendments of 1996. The amendments authorize ten million dollars for each fiscal year from 1996 through 2000 for counseling pregnant women on HIV disease, for "outreach efforts to pregnant women at high risk of HN who are not currently receiving prenatal care," and for voluntary testing for pregnant women. The amendments compromise a central question: whether prenatal and neonatal AIDS testing should be compelled. The compromise is complex. The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is instructed to establish a system for states to use to discover and …
A Child's Right To Protection From Transfer Trauma In A Contested Adoption Case, Suellyn Scarnecchia
A Child's Right To Protection From Transfer Trauma In A Contested Adoption Case, Suellyn Scarnecchia
Articles
On August 2, 1993, I arrived at the home of Jan, Robby, and Jessica DeBoer' a few hours before the transfer. At 2:00 P.M. I would carry Jessica out of her home and deliver her to the parents who had won the case,2 her biological mother and father. This task probably would have been easier had I not spent eight days in the trial court listening to the experts explain that this transfer from one set of parents to another would harm Jessica.3 It would have been easier had I not recently obtained affidavits from other experts to persuade the …
Imagining Children's Rights, Suellyn Scarnecchia
Imagining Children's Rights, Suellyn Scarnecchia
Articles
Today, I will tell you some stories about real, live children, whose futures have been determined by our legal system. To speak of children's rights hypothetically, raises images of children suing to go live with their rich uncle or suing to demand a Nintendo system from their parents. I hope that by bringing you stories of the legal system's treatment of real children, you will have a better understanding of what I mean by children's rights and why they must be recognized. Although children's rights have been recognized in limited ways in the areas of free speech, criminal law and …
Democratic Credentials, Donald J. Herzog
Democratic Credentials, Donald J. Herzog
Articles
We've made a mistake, urges Bruce Ackerman. We've failed to notice, or have forgotten, that ours is a dualist democracy: ordinary representatives passing their statutes are in fact the democratic inferiors of We the People, who at rare junctures appear on the scene and affirm new constitutional principles. (Actually, he claims in passing that we have a three-track democracy.)' Dwelling lovingly on dualism, Ackerman doesn't quite forget to discuss democracy, but he comes close. I want to raise some questions about the democratic credentials of Ackerman's view. Not, perhaps, the ones he anticipates. So I don't mean to argue that …