GRAFSTEIN LECTURE- Prof. Radin on Boilerplate – Monday (March 21) at 5 p.m.

Posted: March 17th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Digital Content, Events, Internet, Policy, Technology, Uncategorized | No Comments »
The Centre for Innovation Law and Policy invites you to The 2011 Grafstein Annual Lecture in Communications by Professor 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 and currently Affiliate of the Centre for Innovation for Innovation Law and Policy, University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Please join us on Monday, March 21 at 5:00 p.m. in FLB, Flavelle House, 78 Queen’s Park for Professor Radin’s lecture, entitled: Boilerplate is Changing Our Legal Universe. No RSVP is required. (Reception to follow.)

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.

By reading the above you have agreed to it.


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