Access to Justice and Abuses of Contract

Mass-market standardized fine print altering the rights of consumers is greatly expanding in today’s digital environment. Mass-market boilerplate impacts access to justice when it deletes rights to redress of grievances. Such deletion of rights leads to normative degradation because it undermines agreement, the basis of justifiable contractual enforcement, and it leads to democratic degradation because it undermines the basis of civil society and the Rule of Law. A brief comparison of US and Canadian common-law suggests that Canada’s legal system is less willing to allow these inroads into access to justice.