The 2011 Grafstein Lecture in Communications

Margaret Jane Radin
Henry King Ransom Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School
William Benjamin Scott & Luna M. Scott Professor of Law, emerita, Stanford University
Adjunct Professor, University of Toronto Faculty of Law

"Boilerplate is Changing Our Legal Universe"

Monday, March 21, 2011
5:00 p.m. (Reception to follow.)
   Room FLB, Flavelle House, 78 Queen’s Park.

Read a description of Prof. Radin's lecture

Many people enter into contracts every day without knowing it, or at least without being able to do anything about it.  Often, when we buy a product or service, we are stuck with a set of standardized terms (known as a contract of adhesion, or more colloquially, boilerplate). Boilerplate is proliferating immensely in the networked digital environment.   We are clicking “I agree” to terms we do not read, and would not understand if we did.

Boilerplate is problematic both from a normative and democratic perspective. From a normative point of view, such contracts are hard to reconcile with freedom of contract. Boilerplate also undermines principles of democratic ordering, because when firms use boilerplate to divest recipients of entitlements enacted by democratic processes, those processes lose their significance.

Yet boilerplate is a fact of contemporary life.  What, then, if anything, can be done to ameliorate its normative and democratic embarrassments?   Professor Radin will discuss this question, and those attending the lecture will offer their own suggestions.

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