Consumer contracts are everywhere. The number of contracts you enter into today may surprise you. Most of the contracts you enter into no longer involve a pen and paper. Purchasing a morning coffee, visiting a website, or scheduling a delivery are just a few daily transactions that more often than not include contract terms.
In this episode, consumer contract experts Omri Ben-Shahar and Florencia Marotta-Wurgler discuss several types of consumer contracts, enforceability of terms, and the potential consequences of agreeing to these terms without reading the fine print.
Omri Ben-Shahar
Omri Ben-Shahar is the Leo and Eileen Herzel Professor of Law, and Kearney Director and founder of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School. He is the Co-Reporter of The American Law Institute’s Restatement Third of Consumer Contracts.
Before coming to Chicago, he was the Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Michigan. Prior to that, he taught at Tel-Aviv University, was a member of Israel's Antitrust Court and clerked at the Supreme Court of Israel. He teaches contracts, sales, insurance Law, consumer law, e-commerce, food and drug law, law and economics, and game theory and the law. He writes in the fields of contract law and consumer protection. He is the co-author of More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure (Princeton 2014). Omri is the Kearney Director of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics, and the Editor of the Journal of Legal Studies. Omri earned his Ph.D. in Economics and S.J.D. from Harvard in 1995 and his B.A. and LL.B. from the Hebrew University in 1990.
Florencia Marotta-Wurgler
Florencia Marotta-Wurgler is a professor of law at New York University School of Law and the director of NYU Law Abroad in Buenos Aires. Her teaching and research interests are contracts, consumer privacy, electronic commerce, and law and economics.
Her published research has addressed various problems associated with standard form contracts online, such as the effectiveness of disclosure regimes, delayed presentation of terms, and whether people read the fine print. She is a Co-Reporter of The American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contracts, a board member of the American Law and Economics Association, and a fellow at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU School of Law. She is currently working on a large empirical project on consumer privacy policies online and on the effectiveness of the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy enforcement actions. In 2009, she testified before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation at a hearing titled, “Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and Their Impact on American Consumers.” She received a B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. cum laude from NYU School of Law.
Omri Ben-Shahar Scholarly Articles
Florencia Marotta-Wurgler Scholarly Articles
For a transcript of the full episode, please contact communications@ali.org.
