Stolen Goods, A Cruise Disaster and a Right of Way Gone Wrong: Three Unconscionable Contracts Cases From a Law and Economics Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Hunter Engineering Co. v. Syncrude Canada Ltd., the Canadian Supreme Court rejected the doctrine of fundamental breach in favour of unconscionability, a more openly discretionary decision-making tool. This article asserts that the doctrine of ‘unconscionability’ and ‘inequality of bargaining power’ are ambiguous terms that allow the court to decide however it sees fit. It is argued that using an economic perspective to decide these cases would provide structure and predictability, and allow parties to make deals with more confidence. Through the examples of three important cases from Canada (Solway v. Davis Moving and Storage), Australia (Dillon v. Baltic Shipping), and New Zealand (Nichols v. Jessup), this article shows how an economic model for decision-making would work to lend more consistency to unconscionability decisions. Finally, three common arguments against lending an economic perspective to the unconscionability doctrine are canvassed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.022 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".