Tess Wilkinson‐Ryan, David A. Hoffman, and Emily Campbell, all of Penn, have written Contracts for Everyone. Herre’s the abstract:
The architects of American contract law—judges, lawyers, regulators and academics—know a lot about what litigated deals look like, but almost nothing about the contracting of ordinary people. This Article offers a wide-ranging empirical account of how non-elites interact with commercial law. It catalogs contract experiences and attitudes with an in-depth survey of a representative sample of thousands of Americans, asking about deals from home to work and all the digital places in between. We identify systematic patterns of contracting: “Old World” contracts—property contracts, high-dollar loans, sales of goods—“Real World” contracts—or the transactions people are stuck with to get by—and “New World” contracts—crypto, gig work, and other digital deals. Demographic characteristics like race, gender, age and wealth interact with these categories in expected and unexpected ways. Armed with this new map of contracting experiences, we report novel results suggesting that contract experience affects judgments and attitudes about what contract law means.
Overall, we aim to reset the empirical study of contract on a firmer and more inclusive foundation by demystifying the contracting lives of people who don’t end up in court and are not part of commercial networks. That is: to reorient the theoretical core and pedagogical materials that constitute the subject to reach beyond weird, litigated, contracts and toward ones that are common.