Contracts of Adhesion in Light of the Bargain Hypothesis: An Introduction

In short, if Contract is viewed as a system of dealing with consensual obligations, then the premise of a bargain is both necessary and desirable. The difficulty is that under the current state of the law, operative facts sufficient to establish the existence of the requisite bargain often fall far short of guaranteeing the existence of real assent to the exchange. It is in this gap that the adhesive form contract, because it often removes the knowledge and choice essential to real assent, thrives best

The Future of ADR

This article addresses the use of alternative dispute resolution in health care.The article provides a historical analysis of medical malpractice and traces the development of ADR in healthcare. The article discusses the benefits that ADR can and will bring to health care in the future

Judicial Policing of Consumer Arbitration

Adhesive consumer arbitration agreements pose questions that go beyond the problems of adhesion contracting generally. This essay describes why standard-form consumer arbitration requirements may be particularly troublesome. Despite its superficial neutrality, arbitration between individual consumers and business entities may be systematically more favorable to the business entities. The rules of arbitration law, however, inhibit effective judicial policing of the consequences of those inequalities. The federal sources of arbitration law further diminish the ability of state-based contract law to police the more subtle abuses. The result is a particularly difficult jurisprudential problem with a specially weakened legal solution. This essay offers, in very general terms, a framework for thinking about this problem, focusing on the role of judicial oversight in a world of privatized dispute resolution

The Dauer-Brown Letters: Towards a Comprehensive Legal Education

Edward A. Dauer is President of the National Center for Preventive Law at the University of Denver. Louis M. Brown developed and advocates preventive law jurisprudence. In this dialogue, drawn from an exchange of correspondence between them, Dauer and Brown focus their insights on how best to gear law school curricula to train lawyers to handle the complexities of a real life practice