Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
- Institution
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Contracts
The Perverse Consequences Of Disclosing Standard Terms, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
The Perverse Consequences Of Disclosing Standard Terms, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
Cornell Law Review
Although assent is the doctrinal and theoretical hallmark of contract, its relevance for form contracts has been drastically undermined by the overwhelming evidence that no one reads standard terms. Until now, most political and academic discussions of this phenomenon have acknowledged the truth of universally unread contracts, but have assumed that even unread terms are at best potentially helpful, and at worst harmless. This Article makes the empirical case that unread terms are not a neutral part of American commerce; instead, the mere fact of fine print inhibits reasonable challenges to unfair deals. The experimental study reported here tests the …
Contractual Arbitrage, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Contractual Arbitrage, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
Contracts are inevitably incomplete. And standard-form or boilerplate commercial contracts are especially likely to be incomplete because they are approximations; they are not tailored to the needs of particular deals. Not only do these contracts contain gaps but, in an attempt to reduce incompleteness, they often contain clauses with vague or ambiguous terms. Terms with indeterminate meaning present opportunities for strategic behavior well after a contract has been concluded. This linguistic uncertainty in standard form commercial contracts creates an opportunity for “contractual arbitrage”: parties may argue, ex post, that the uncertainties in expression mean something that the contracting parties, ex …
Variation In Boilerplate: Rational Design Or Random Mutation?, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Variation In Boilerplate: Rational Design Or Random Mutation?, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
Standard contract doctrine presumes that sophisticated parties choose their terminology carefully because they want courts or counterparts to understand what they intended. The implication of this “Rational Design” model of rational behavior is that courts should pay careful attention to the precise phrasing of contracts. Using a study of the sovereign bond market, we examine the Rational Design model as applied to standard-form contracting. In NML v. Argentina, federal courts in New York attached importance to the precise phrasing of the boilerplate contracts at issue. The industry promptly condemned the decision for a supposedly erroneous interpretation of a variant of …