Class Proceedings and the Future of Boilerplate in Consumer Contracts: Unconscionability as a Common Law Solution to Class Action Avoidance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Boilerplate text in consumer contracts is ubiquitous, yet consumers have only the slightest understanding of the terms to which they agree. This change in how commerce is conducted has caused contract theory to slip into a different paradigm, divorced from actual agreement. Consumers are now overwhelmingly vulnerable, unknowingly agreeing to a host of terms that discourages all but the boldest consumers from pursuing remedies. In essence, the substance of consumer contracts is at odds with Ontario’s Class Proceedings Act. It should therefore come as no surprise that such contracts have impaired recourse to class proceedings and enabled “class action avoidance,” insulating powerful actors from litigation. Consumer protection legislation has been enacted to shield consumers from these terms that disincentivize pursuing claims, but in response, corporate actors have shifted their focus to advancing other boilerplate as a means of disincentivizing dispute adjudication altogether. In the absence of legislative action to fill the new gaps that corporate actors now exploit, consumer recourse to the CPA has become difficult once again. Crucially, though, aid to consumers has come in the recent growth of the unconscionability doctrine, which has weakened the efficacy of boilerplate clauses and restored (at least in part) consumers’ ability to seek relief. Notwithstanding the doctrine’s weakness with respect to promoting commercial and legal certainty, the rise of unconscionability suggests that the common law provides a valuable interim supplement to consumer rights protection — albeit one that should be scrutinized in light of its weakness as a long-term solution.
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 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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".