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In this article I analyze Kar and Radin's critique of boilerplate text in contract. The problems identified in boilerplate are significant. I then describe the test that they offer to distinguish between proper contract and "pseudo-contract" in boilerplate. The test is constructed upon the use of Gricean Maxims slightly modified for the context of contract law. Next, Karl Llewellyn's test for boilerplate is described. Ultimately, through the use of a couple of examples it is argued that Llewellyn's test is a better option. Even with this result, much of the Kar and Radin critique of boilerplate is significant and valuable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review draws on the notion of "contract schemas" to characterize what ordinary people think is happening when they enter into contractual arrangements. It proposes that contracts are schematically represented as written documents filled with impenetrable text containing hidden strings, which are routinely signed without comprehension. This cognitive template, activated whenever people encounter objects with these characteristic features, confers certain default assumptions, associations, and expectancies. A review of the literature suggests that contract schemas supply (a) the assumption that terms will be enforced as written, (b) the feeling that one is obligated to perform, and (c) the sense that one has forfeited rights. Contract schemas should be of interest to legal scholars, because their psychological and behavioral effects often sit at odds with contract doctrine. Laypeople expect the law to find consent in situations where they would prefer it did not, and where it in fact does not. Contract schemas should also be of interest to ordinary consumers, who may find themselves relinquishing legally valid claims, erroneously assuming away rights, and/or blaming themselves. Future research should explore the consequences that flow from the lay perception that the law is rigidly formalistic to the detriment of fairness. Do such attitudes undermine the perceived moral authority of the law? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although formal guidance instructs firms to avoid issuing lengthy and boilerplate risk factor disclosures, regulators and users of financial statements note these disclosures are excessively long and boilerplate. The persistence of these characteristics is surprising given that prior research finds that firms disclosing lengthy and boilerplate risk factors experience negative capital market consequences. We investigate two potential sources of firms' incentives to issue such disclosures by examining how judicial and regulatory assessments of firms' risk factor disclosures correlate with the disclosure length and boilerplate. Results suggest that lengthier and more boilerplate risk factor disclosures are less likely to be considered inadequate under judicial and regulatory review. Further analysis finds that when risk factor language is assessed as adequate in judicial review, industry peers borrow that language more frequently, and that judicial assessments of risk factor disclosures prompt industry peers to lengthen their risk factor disclosures. JEL Classifications: D8; G38; M4. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the language of corporate accounts of business and human rights. Using innovative methods drawn from computational corpus linguistics, the article explores discussions of business and human rights in a data set composed of 346 corporate social responsibility reports drawn from firms in extractive industries. The article concludes that human rights are 'put to work' in corporate accounts by reconfiguring their meaning to draw them into the 'familiar frames' of business accounting narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legal effect of the "No Oral Modification clause" ("NOM clause") has been described by the UK Supreme Court as a "truly fundamental issue in the law of contract". Courts in Australia, common law Canada, and many US states had held that the NOM clause, which prescribes that an agreement may not be amended save in writing, is unenforceable. However, in a recent decision, the UK Supreme Court unanimously held that it is enforceable. This Essay seeks to demonstrate that a uniform policy of non-enforcement of the NOM clause is more consistent with the basic principles of contract law and will likely yield greater certainty and justice in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial reports have grown significantly over recent years due to new disclosure and reporting requirements mandated by policymakers, regulators, and standard setters. Entities that have to comply with these requirements seek to maximise efficient reporting processes and do not usually review their disclosure packages on a yearly basis. To overcome this challenge, a thorough debate is needed about (a) what kind of information should (still) be reported and (b) how and where that kind of information should be reported - preferably without comingling the two issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Removal of boilerplate is one of the essential tasks in web corpus construction and web indexing. Boilerplate (redundant and automatically inserted material like menus, copyright notices, navigational elements, etc.) is usually considered to be linguistically unattractive for inclusion in a web corpus. Also, search engines should not index such material because it can lead to spurious results for search terms if these terms appear in boilerplate regions of the web page. In this paper, I present and evaluate a supervised machine-learning approach to general-purpose boilerplate detection for languages based on Latin alphabets using Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). It is both very efficient and very accurate (between 95 % and $$99\,\%$$ correct classifications, depending on the input language). I show that language-specific classifiers greatly improve the accuracy of boilerplate detectors. The single features used for the classification are evaluated with regard to the merit they contribute to the classification. Furthermore, I show that the accuracy of the MLP is on a par with that of a wide range of other classifiers. My approach has been implemented in the open-source texrex web page cleaning software, and large corpora constructed using it are available from the COW initiative, including the CommonCOW corpora created from CommonCrawl datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The HLA Hart Memorial Lecture, delivered at Oxford on 24 May 2016. The Lecture considers how the advent and growth of the information society is posing challenges for the traditional theories of contract, and for the duties of the state with regard to contractual ordering. In particular, the Lecture considers the lack of 'fit' between certain prevalent uses of contract and the underlying justification for contract enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free choice of law appears to be the pivot and the unchallenged champion of the private international law of contracts. Yet to stop at this would be a fallacy and would disregard the challenges it has to face. Those challenges come from different quarters. In B2C contracts in the EU not only the more favourable law principles as enshrined in Article 6(2) of the Rome I Regulation must be observed, but also any requirements which the Unfair Contract Terms Directive imposes. Transparency in particular ranks high. InVerein für Konsumenteninformation v Amazonthe Court of Justice of the European Union has imposed duties on businesses and professionals to inform their consumer customers about at least the existence and the basic structure of the more favourable law principle. This landmark decision might not stand on ground as firm as it implies at first sight. Its fundament might be shaken by inconsistency. But practice has to comply with it and has to observe its consequences. On a more abstract level, it raises ample necessity to reflect about the modern-day structure of “free” choice of law. In this context, it is argued that the system established for parties’ choice of law in the Rome I Regulation does not allow for a content review of choice of law agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Market-inalienability has a central place in developed societies that embrace private law institutions and a traditional understanding of the role of the polity in underwriting, managing, and preserving those institutions. Market-inalienability is a form of non-commodification. Taking up the issue of what things or relationships can be treated as commodities, I first critique a mode of inquiry--a traditional view of law and economics--that finds no problem with commodification of anything whatsoever. Counter to this mode of reasoning, I review two points of view that consider some kinds of commodification wrongful. Finding neither of these anti-commodification theories satisfactory, I review in some detail the example of baby-selling to show the dilemmas of commodification and the complexity of arguments about it. I then turn to the practice of standardized fine-print contracts ("boilerplate") that routinely waive the background legal rights of those who receive them. This practice of using contract to escape basic rights commodifies some rights that ought to be marketinalienable. Such rights should remain permanently in the care of the polity and should not be treated as objects of trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the term boilerplate also known as the standardized terms of contracts with the reference of the book "Bartleby the Scrivener," by Herman Melville. It states that contracts are considered as a symbol of freedom and autonomy in the nineteenth-century of the U.S. Information on the limitations of the contracts and the definition of boilerplate as stated in the book "Bartleby," by Herman Melville is also presented.