Book Review: Margaret Jane Radin, Boilerplate, the Fine Print, Vanishing Rights, and the Rule of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2013)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Boilerplate, the Fine Print, Vanishing Rights, and the Rule of Law, Margaret Jane Radin offers a brilliant expose of the phenomenon of boilerplate, those legal terms to which we agree without doing so. Radin unravels the broader and insidious effects of boilerplate terms, and why increasingly they should be of concern. Radin’s first claim is that our inability to address properly the absence, or problematic nature, of consent to boilerplate terms leads to a normative degradation. Radin’s second main argument is that the omnipresent mass-market deployment of boilerplate rights-deletion schemes ultimately leads to a democratic degradation.The book provides a framework of analysis to help determine which boilerplate clauses should be upheld and which should be non-enforceable. The framework offers a nuanced approach that does not advocate for the eradication of boilerplate. In parallel, Radin proposes the creation of a new tort for “intentional deprivation of basic legal rights.” Introducing this new tort is a bold idea to remedy the main claim of the book: beyond each individual transaction, the compounded effects of boilerplate rights-deletion schemes can be harmful to the normative fabric of contracts and to democracy. One resonating theme in the book is our failure to grasp the proper role of the state in regulating the private sphere, which in turn threatens private ordering itself. Radin’s exegesis of the boilerplate phenomenon pierces the fog around the respective role that private and public ordering ought to play. Her work calls upon greater public accountability and appeals to a sense of collectivity in responding to boilerplate terms.
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.070 | 0.055 |
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".