Law students study landmark contract law cases; scholars write law review articles on contract law precedents and influential judicial decisions (typically from states’ appellate and supreme courts); and the media covers high-profile, high-value contracts and high-stakes contract disputes between sophisticated parties. However, according to Contract Law and Civil Justice in Local Courts, these represent exceptional examples. The majority of contract disputes (over eighty percent) are adjudicated in local courts. In this fascinating article, Cathy Hwang and Justin Weinstein-Tull examine this understudied domain, shifting the attention from the extraordinary to the mundane.
The authors begin by describing proceedings in local courts. Most judges in local courts do not hold law degrees and have only completed brief training courses that include introductory legal instruction. In many cases, at least one party is not represented by legal counsel. Moreover, most cases in local courts do not result in written opinions, and those that do are typically unpublished, and proceedings are rarely recorded. The disputes themselves often involve non-negotiated contracts that parties signed without legal counsel, and without reading them. These cases frequently concern small amounts in controversy, including debt collection; auto loans; landlords-tenants disputes; contract disputes with general contractors or landscapers; small-scale business-to-business services; and family loans.
The authors then examine what form of contract law is actually applied in local courts. Rather than focusing on law on the books, they study contract law as experienced by most parties, what might be termed everyday or ground-level contract law. They shift attention from formal sources such as caselaw, scholarship, treatises, and casebooks to law as practiced in context.
They find that contract law in local courts is informal and discretionary. Local court judges tend to rely less on formal doctrines, concepts, and principles and more on considerations of equity and fairness, as well as values such as fidelity to the contractual text, commitment to mediation, and common sense. Their reasoning draws primarily on the contract itself, with comparatively little reliance on statutes, caselaw, or treatises. In this way, judges appear to promote community justice and civil justice.
This insightful article raises several important points.
First, the methodology. The authors employ a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative data, including state-level filing data from the National Center for State Courts, interviews with local court judges, and judicial training materials. Given the absence of published decisions and recorded proceedings, this approach is both necessary and appropriate, though it remains relatively uncommon in contract law scholarship.
Second, the article focuses on law in action rather than law on the books, revealing a gap between “everyday” contract law and formal, doctrinal contract law. While some scholars have viewed this divergence as problematic, the authors suggest that, although the judges may lack detailed doctrinal knowledge, they possess a functional, intuitive understanding of contract law. Rather than applying formal rules, they draw on the underlying values of contract law. Even without adherence to black-letter law, their decisions may remain faithful to the core purposes of contract law. This insight has implications well beyond local courts or contract law.
Third, the article prompts further inquiry into the nature of “values-driven adjudication”. How different is this line of reasoning from the application of value-laden contract law doctrines and principles? Is one approach preferable? Does the article point toward a contextualized form of contract law tailored to small-claims disputes, or does it point to the risk of entrenching a bifurcated system, one for sophisticated commercial actors and another for less advantaged parties?
Fourth, the article raises questions about how judges should navigate potentially compelling values, such as fairness, autonomy, and efficiency, when making decisions. How should they engage in complex processes of balancing multiple normative, sometimes contradicting, considerations? This, too, is a lesson with broader relevance.
In their conclusion, the authors call for further research in this area. This is a welcome and important invitation, and I hope the authors and other scholars will continue to examine contract law in local courts. For example, while the article explores implications for contract theory, contract design, civil justice, and judicial education, additional work could examine consequences for legal education and the judiciary system more broadly.
Finally, although the authors conducted interviews with judges, it would be valuable to hear directly from the parties themselves. Despite the relatively low rate of appeals from local court decisions, the experience of litigants, as contracting parties and as participants in local court proceedings, would offer important additional perspectives.
This article makes a significant contribution to the study of contract law in practice by illuminating a largely overlooked domain. It challenges us to reconsider what constitutes the core of contract law: highly visible, widely cited appellate decisions, or the large volume of everyday cases that shape the lived experiences of most parties. As the authors suggest, incorporating these experiences into contract law scholarship has the potential to render the field more diverse, pluralist, and ultimately more humane.
