PUBLIC POLICY IS AN UNRULY HORSE AND THE LAW OF CONTRACT IS AN ASS
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Online boilerplate contracts pose fundamental challenges to the traditional principles of contract law. Can a contract characterized by the complete absence of bargaining, choice, and the possibility of amendment be meaningfully characterized as a contract? Do consumers have a real choice as to the non-negotiable terms and conditions (including litigation avoidance clauses) presented by powerful digital platform firms like Google, Twitter, and Facebook? How far should the courts go in regulating these boilerplate arrangements, particularly in the abiding absence of legislative direction or reform? In Douez v Facebook, Inc, the Supreme Court of Canada considered for the first time the enforceability of a forum selection clause in an online boilerplate consumer contract. The Court’s answers—rendered in three sets of reasons—illustrate the tension between not only legal doctrine and public policy, but also between the courts and legislatures as sites of public norm generation and legitimation. The Court’s reasoning in Facebook continues a recent trend in its jurisprudence of blurring the lines between the application of doctrine and public policymaking. The result, quite apart from the equities or merits of the Court’s decision, furnishes further proof that public policy is not only an unruly horse, but that it is also capable of making an ass out of the law of contract.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it