During the late nineteenth century, Anglo-American contract jurisprudence was dominated by the will theory, which posited that legal obligation derives strictly from subjective consensus ad idem—a genuine meeting of minds between autonomous actors. The simultaneous emergence of mass-distribution capitalism, however, necessitated standard-form agreements: non-negotiated, pre-drafted instruments offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. To reconcile these ubiquitous instruments with classical will theory without acknowledging structural asymmetries in bargaining power, legal formalists advanced the doctrine of 'blanket assent.' Under this construct, the act of affixing a signature was treated as an objective manifestation of consent to the totality of the document's terms, rendering an adherent's failure to read or comprehend specific clauses doctrinally immaterial. Nevertheless, when the strict enforcement of such boilerplate clauses threatened to impose catastrophic liabilities on non-drafting parties, appellate tribunals repeatedly intervened, deploying equitable principles such as unconscionability to excise onerous provisions while leaving the remainder of the agreement intact.
Based on the passage, which one of the following statements regarding the late-nineteenth-century legal formalist perspective on standard-form contracts is most strongly supported?
- AIt maintained that standard-form agreements were inherently legally deficient because they failed to establish genuine subjective agreement between contracting parties.
- BIt proposed that equitable remedies such as unconscionability should be formally codified by legislatures rather than applied at the discretion of appellate courts.
- It treated a signatory's subjective unawareness of specific contractual terms as insufficient to undermine the legal enforceability of those terms.Answer
- DIt held that appellate courts should invalidate entire standard-form contracts whenever a single provision is found to allocate disproportionate risk.
- EIt conceded that the proliferation of mass-distribution capitalism required a complete abandonment of the traditional will theory of contract.