University of Michigan Law School University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository Articles Faculty Scholarship 2016 A Complainant-Oriented Approach to Unconscionability and Contract Law Nicholas Cornell University of Michigan Law School,
[email protected] Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles/2045 Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles Part of the Contracts Commons, and the Law and Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Cornell, Nicolas. "A Complainant-Oriented Approach to Unconscionability and Contract Law." U. Pa. L. Rev. 164, no. 5 (2016): 1131-76. (Work published when author not on Michigan Law faculty.) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ARTICLE A COMPLAINANT-ORIENTED APPROACH TO UNCONSCIONABILITY AND CONTRACT LAW NICOLAS CORNELL† This Article draws attention to a conceptual point that has been overlooked in recent discussions about the theoretical foundations of contract law. I argue that, rather than enforcing the obligations of promises, contract law concerns complaints against promissory wrongs. This conceptual distinction is easy to miss. If one assumes that complaints arise whenever an obligation has been violated, then the distinction does not seem meaningful. I show, however, that an obligation can be breached without giving rise to a valid complaint. This Article illustrates the importance of this conceptual distinction by focusing first on the doctrine of substantive unconscionability.