Editors’ Note

Abstract

Our world today is dominated by standard form contracts. Whether we know it or not, each of us probably agrees to dozens of them on a daily basis: when we buy a song on ITunes; when we sell an old book on Amazon; when we agree to some invasive hospital procedure; when we buy some Greek government bonds; and so on and so forth. The typical complaints about standard form contracts are that they are coercive (one has no choice but to agree to them in most cases, unless one is willing to walk away from the transaction) and that no one reads them (if people actually tried to read these contracts, it would take so much time that the entire global economy would grind to a halt). Those are legitimate concerns and push in the direction of telling us that perhaps we should not pretend that these are anything like the metaphorical bargained-for exchange with a ‘meeting of the minds’ that first-year law students around the world are taught about. Our concern, and one that induced us to commission the three lead articles in this volume, however, has to do with a different aspect of these standard form contracts. And that is encrustation.