> Every contract is legal unless there is a specific reason for it not to be legal. I always wondered if this was a major structural folly. It sort of worked

> Every contract is legal unless there is a specific reason for it not to be legal. I always wondered if this was a major structural folly. It sort of worked when contracts were mostly B2B things, or rare B2C dealing with significant okay-better-talk-it-over-with-a-lawyer financial stakes. But these days, a typical consumer is incidentally tangling themselves into hundreds of pages of contracts a day, written by people with far more access to legal support and presented with little option for negotiation. I wonder if we'd be better off with just standardized "Mad Libs" style contracts. There'd be only one standard retail sales contract, one standard software license, one standard website terms of service, etc, codified into law. Nothing else is binding. A lot of contract law would become cut and dry because there'd be no easy way to introduce new ambiguities or surprises into it-- we'd have most of the precedent we needed pretty fast. It would also force a lot more transparency into some of the skeezier applications of contracts. There's no room for an unexpected cost or caveat when it's the same contract template every other business in your category uses. If the firms that all slapped "no class actions" and "mandatory arbitration" into every little clickthrough had to instead had to lobby a regulator to change the standard contract template, it would likely trigger public backlash.