Anne Fleming, The Rise and Fall of Unconscionability as the ‘Law of the Poor’, 102 Georgetown Law Journal 1383 (2014). Who is best suited to police unfair terms – the market, the judiciary, or the legislature? Williams vs Walker-Thomas Furniture has long been offered as a cautionary tale, but in her 2014 article, legal historian Anne Fleming takes on the standard narrative of judicial overreach and recasts the relationships among institutional actors in a reform movement. In 1965, Judge Skelly Wright ruled that Ora Lee Williams’s contract to pay for furniture on a pro rata installment plan was subject to review for unconscionability – a moment of judicial activism that was later blamed for the decline and stagnation of the doctrine of unconscionability … (more)
[Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, JOTWELL, 30 January]
First posted 2018-01-30 14:02:41
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