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This chapter examines the normative degradation caused by the apparent lack of consent to boilerplate. It first considers the varieties of nonconsent to which consent is contrasted, including coercion and its related conceptions of force and duress; fraud, with its allied notions of misrepresentation and deception; and sheer ignorance. It then discusses problematic consent, focusing on situations involving “information asymmetry” and heuristic biases. It also explores strategies of assimilating World B to consent, with particular emphasis on the devolution of voluntary agreement. The chapter shows that consent is problematic even when recipients click a box that says “I agree,” because it remains unclear what they could actually be agreeing to.

This chapter examines whether autonomy theory (agreement, consent) can justify boilerplate rights deletion schemes. It first considers strategies for assimilating World B to consent by focusing on the devolution of voluntary agreement. It then explains the difference between agreement and the notions of consent or assent before discussing the doctrine of “reasonable expectations” in insurance contracts as opposed to the notion of radical unexpectedness. It also looks at the objective theory of contract, arguing that it is not applicable to boilerplate. Furthermore, “browsewrap” and “rolling contracts” cannot be assumed to yield obligation by invoking the objective theory of contract because of the possibility of sheer ignorance. The chapter concludes by analyzing whether a firm is justified in its assertion that by clicking “I agree” the recipient actually is consenting to be bound to its terms.

The Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) is a comprehensive economic organization born in May 2002 out of the amalgamation of the Keidanren (Japan Federation of Economic Organizations) and the Nikkeiren (Japan Federation of Employers' Associations). Most of the major private companies in Japan including energy and natural resource sector companies are members of the Nippon Keidanren. In the field of the environment, it has adopted a series of voluntary agreements including the Global Environment Charter (1991), the Charter of Corporate Behavior (1991, fourth version released in 2004), the Appeal on the Environment (1996), and the Voluntary Action Plan on the Environment (1997). In accordance with the Voluntary Action Plan, 37 major industrial associations have published their own voluntary action plans. These voluntary initiatives may be characterized as voluntary codes of conduct. This chapter reviews this voluntary initiative in which energy and natural resource companies have been major participants. These voluntary agreements and declarations are appropriate instruments for private companies to discharge their general corporate social responsibility, though they may be far from perfect for combating global warming problems. However, greenhouse gas emission reduction is likely to be influenced in Japan by the emission reduction targets that the Japanese government announced in 2005.

This chapter discusses how the structure of contractual liability was laid down by the end of the 13th century and remained fundamentally the same through the 14th and 15 centuries. Liability depended on the voluntary agreement; whatever form of action was in issue, only the parties to the agreement were affected by it; whatever the form of action, the purpose of the plaintiff's claim was to obtain the value of the intended performance; and in informal contracts, the law was concerned only with relationships of reciprocity.

This chapter provides an intellectual background to the freedom of contract issue in England in 1770. It suggests that the modern law of contract and its underlying principles appear to have had no relationship to the ideas which underlay the concept of social contract. It discusses several issues relevant to social contract. These include the notion of a contract as the creation of a voluntary agreement, the impact of the Revolution settlement of 1688 on political theories, and the cohesiveness of the governing class.

Of all the EU’s external policies, the Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative is among the most clearly experimentalist. This initiative seeks to combat illegal logging and promote sustainable forestry through negotiating Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) with developing countries and requiring all firms placing timber products on the EU market to ensure that they were not illegally harvested in their place of origin. As the chapter shows, both the VPAs and the EU Timber Regulation display pronounced experimentalist features, in terms of their regulatory approach, governance architecture, and interactions with other public and private transnational regimes operating in this field. But as the chapter also demonstrates, the development and dynamics of this EU experimentalist regime are as much a product of transnational influences from multilateral institutions, NGO campaigns, and interactions with third countries such as the US, as of endogenous developments within the Union itself.

This chapter covers the discourses of corporate social responsibility and citizenship as relatively “deterritorialized” and “non-legal” responses to problems of corporate regulation. It explores two different formulations of responsibility in corporate regulation. The first formulation focuses on responsibility in the context of U.S.-based legal debates over the social and political effects of economic concentration, while the second formulation considers attempts to make transnational corporations behave responsibly through international legal frameworks and voluntary agreements. The chapter concludes with a description of Stephen Hymer’s lecture regarding the inability of private multinational capitalism to provide a world of peace and prosperity.