“This is the seventh in a series of posts reviewing Margaret Radin’s Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights and the Rule of Law. Oren Bar-Gill is a Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Law, Economics and Organization, New York University School of Law. Professor Radin’s book is an eloquent and powerful critique of the fine-term, boilerplate contracts that pervade modern life. Its breadth – in terms of the range of theoretical perspectives that it considers and the different legal policy responses that it discusses – is impressive. In this comment, I focus on the economic analysis of boilerplate. I suggest that Radin’s treatment of this particular perspective, while clearly very useful, is, in some respects, incomplete. In her discussion of the economic analysis of boilerplate, Radin focuses on, and criticizes, a Chicago-school approach that minimizes any concern about boilerplate. But this is only one strand in the economic analysis of form contracts. There is another, perhaps more influential strand that readily acknowledges the challenges that boilerplate presents for market efficiency and for welfare maximization …” (more)
[ContractsProf Blog, 21 May]
First posted 2013-05-21 13:17:04
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