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Abstract: Most American contract law disputes take place in the shadows, unnoticed by commentators, scholars, and casebooks. These disputes--often heard by lay judges in local courts that do not publish their opinions--account for more than 80 percent of total contract disputes. Using state-level filing data and original interviews with local court judges, this Article unearths, for the first time, this vitally important yet understudied world. Our findings provide a blueprint for new research on local courts and contract law, with wide-ranging implications for theory and practice.
This Article makes three contributions to the literature. First, we identify what we call "values-driven adjudication." Through interviews, we find that local court judges know relatively little about legal concepts like unconscionability, parol evidence, and canons of construction--principles that scholars, lawyers, and students have always believed form the basis of contract law adjudication. Instead, local court judges rely on broader values of fairness, commitment to mediation, fidelity to law (as they understand the law to be), and community norms. Second, while values-driven adjudication might cause concern at first glance, we find that many of the broader ideas local judges instinctively rely on vindicate contract law's underlying values. Local judges may not know the contours of the doctrine of unconscionability, for example, but they do care that contracts are fair. They may not know that efficiency motivates some contract law doctrines, but they do attempt to mediate contract law disputes in ways that avoid appeals. Finally, we consider the wide-ranging implications of these findings for contract theory, contract design, civil justice, and judicial education, and we call for more research on this shrouded but vitally important world of local courts.
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