The Death of Contract, Redux: Boilerplate and the End of Interpretation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the conceptual and practical problems posed by so-called boilerplate contracts (or standard form contracts, contracts of adhesion) through the lens of the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent jurisprudence on contract law. Specifically, can non-negotiable and one-sided boilerplate “contracts” satisfy, not only the standard requirements of contract formation, but also the court’s recognition of an organizing obligation of good faith and its inherently fact-sensitive approach to contractual interpretation? Through an analysis of two recent applications of the court’s new contract law jurisprudence, this article concludes that non-negotiable boilerplate contracts – which are more accurately termed “products” – cannot and should not be shoehorned into the existing categories of contract law. Consequently, contract law is dead yet again. Law reform is necessary.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.098 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".