‘Everything You Wanted To Know About (Commercial) Boilerplate’

Robert E Scott, Stephen J Choi and Mitu Gulati, ‘Commercial Boilerplate: A Review and Research Agenda’, Annual Review of Law and Socical Science (forthcoming 2024), available at SSRN (18 January 18, 2024). Contract law as an academic discipline is as uneasily stuck together as the 1L course itself. The two major strands of self-identifying contract scholars – loosely, those that unpack ‘negotiated’ business deals and those that lament ‘adhesion’ consumer contracts – rarely talk to or learn from one another. And the problem replicates in the scholarly fields that have sloughed off from the core over time, from antitrust to corporate law, and from private employment to consumer privacy. Cross-pollination between scholars working on similar problems of consent, but on different types of agreements, is lamentably rare. There are many causes for the fragmentation, and resultant decline, of a discipline that once produced great public goods like the UCC and the Restatement (2nd) of Contracts … (more)

[David Hoffman, JOTWELL, 10 April 2024]

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