Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Contracts
Vertical Boilerplate, James Gibson
Vertical Boilerplate, James Gibson
Law Faculty Publications
Despite what we learn in law school about the “meeting of the minds,” most contracts are merely boilerplate—take-it-or-leave-it propositions. Negotiation is nonexistent; we rely on our collective market power as consumers to regulate contracts’ content. But boilerplate imposes certain information costs because it often arrives late in the transaction and is hard to understand. If those costs get too high, then the market mechanism fails. So how high are boilerplate’s information costs? A few studies have attempted to measure them, but they all use a “horizontal” approach—i.e., they sample a single stratum of boilerplate and assume that it represents the …
Click To Agree, James Gibson
Click To Agree, James Gibson
Law Faculty Publications
The author reports on an analysis that he’s done of the cost to the consumer of actually reading and comprehending the boilerplate contracts that accompanied four computers that he bought, compared to potential consumer benefit.