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This article considers how legal frameworks shape the autonomous subject in a global economy. It makes salient the ways that different legal frameworks presume and enforce a particular subjectivity by positing certain behavioral expectations of various subjects. It does so through a focus on the underexplored rhetoric and implicit narratives of consumer contract law and transactional practice in the American and European regimes. By comparing the approach of the European Union to consumer contract, which posits the consumer as facing significant constraints on agency, to that in the United States, which elides functional limits of consumer knowledge and choice, this article highlights the dynamics of power implicit in how regional legal systems variously recognize parties’ behavioral expectations or subjectivity. The article also demonstrates how the positing of subjectivity informs an individual's subjective experience and shapes the corporate subject in a global context. Through two case studies of the role of ancillary terms in American consumer contracts, the article shows how the legal framework enables more powerful actors to leverage the very narrative of agency and rhetoric of agreement as well as the consumer's posited subjectivity to manipulate a consumer's actual subjective experience and hinder choice and agency. Juxtaposing the American and European consumer as subjects, this article highlights the ways in which hierarchies of subjects may be created and, at the very least, how competing subjectivities come to the fore in the global market through contract law.

This article offers an original reading of Herman Melville's canonical story, \"Bartleby, the Scrivener,\" identifying the nineteenth-century notion and practice of contract as a significant, previously overlooked, element of the tale. Considering contract as a prevailing symbol of autonomy and freedom in nineteenth-century America, the article highlights the necessarily qualified nature of contract as a manifestation of intention. From this perspective, the notion of boilerplate, or standard-ized terms, can be viewed as an alternative model for the operation of contract and expression. Reading \"Bartleby\" in light of the limits of contract and the notion of boilerplate as a speech act dissociated from the specific intention of an individual, the article traces the ways in which form language pervades the tale. In particular, boilerplate can be seen in the documents that Bartleby is hired to reproduce as well as in his signature refrain, \"I would prefer not to,\" by which he manifests his desire to exit the framework of capitalism and contract. As a sign of Bartleby's inscrutability-or the elusiveness of intention-as well as of his distinct character, the refrain demonstrates the expressive potential of boilerplate. In addition, boilerplate proves a tool of Bartleby's successful, if temporary, resistance to the broader structure of contract. At the same time, situated in a social framework that at times naturalizes inequity and inequality through contract, Bartleby's defining response is not only absorbed into the dominant language of exchange but can be seen to be derived from it. As this article reveals, \"Bartleby\" anticipates the significance and limits of contract as a vehicle of freedom in the American cultural consciousness during emancipation.

Complexity and uncertainty define our world, now more than ever. Scholars and practitioners have celebrated modular contract design as an especially effective tool to manage these challenges. Modularity divides complex structures into relatively discrete, independent components with simple connections. The benefits of this fundamental drafting approach are intuitive. Lawyers divide contracts into sections and provisions to make them easier to understand and reduce uncertainty. Dealmakers constructing complex transactions use portable agreements as building blocks to reduce drafting costs and enable innovation. Little attention, however, has been paid to the risks introduced by modularity in contracts. This Article demonstrates how this touted and now-ingrained drafting approach introduces new forms of the very costs it seeks to minimize. The Article is the first to identify the types of risks introduced by modularity at the intra-contract level, among provisions, and the inter-contract level, among agreements that constitute deals. The Article groups these risks into three categories: First, \"intertextualism,\" which occurs when the operation of a discrete, or even standard, provision seems clear in isolation but is made uncertain by the presence of other discrete terms. Second, \"modular drift,\" which occurs when drafters transplant provisions specific to one transactional context into another transactional context, introducing uncertainty. Third, \"latent triggers,\" which occur when compartmentalization invites error or obscures a nuance in the interaction among discrete provisions. The Article urges courts to articulate distinctions between contract types and offers tools to contract drafters to mitigate uncertainty. It also makes a theoretical contribution with implications for contract doctrine and contract innovation. It shows how modularity can disrupt seemingly stable, standardized provisions, diminishing their certainty and imposing information costs on future drafters who seek to rely on precedent provisions or agreements. It thereby identifies a critical dimension of contract risk that complicates the balancing of standardization and private choice in contracts.

Neoliberalism, as an abundantly flexible intellectual scheme and set of governance programs, has dominated governance techniques for close to fifty years. In this time, both the doctrines and their real-world applications have evolved at a rapid pace and moved far beyond the intellectual principles formulated in the 1936 Colloque Walter Lippman, from which the doctrine emerged. Neoliberal doctrine has transformed into an exceedingly variable, opportunistic, and at times, contradictory set of dicta, aspects of which have inverted and reimagined many of its prior intellectual fundaments. On the level of practical governance program, neoliberalism has metamorphosed \"from dogmatic deregulation to market-friendly reregulation, from structural adjustment to good governance, from budget cuts to regulation-by-audit, from welfare retrenchment to active social policy, from privatization to public-private partnership, from greed-is-good to markets-with-morals.\" Neoliberal legal regimes have also taken numerous forms. The straightforward deregulatory programme of early roll-back neoliberalism has been replaced by increasingly intensive, conceptually variegated, pro-market, technocratic and undemocratic re-regulatory interventions, which, conceptually, seem to share little besides a fundamental belief in the power of markets, price mechanisms, and market actors, in various configurations and deployments, to do better than their alternatives.

This article offers an original reading of Herman Melville's canonical story, \"Bartleby, the Scrivener,\" identifying the nineteenth-century notion and practice of contract as a significant, previously overlooked, element of the tale. Considering contract as a prevailing symbol of autonomy and freedom in nineteenth-century America, the article highlights the necessarily qualified nature of contract as a manifestation of intention. From this perspective, the notion of boilerplate, or standardized terms, can be viewed as an alternative model for the operation of contract and expression. Reading \"Bartleby\" in light of the limits of contract and the notion of boilerplate as a speech act dissociated from the specific intention of an individual, the article traces the ways in which form language pervades the tale. In particular, boilerplate can be seen in the documents that Bartleby is hired to reproduce as well as in his signature refrain, \"I would prefer not to,\" by which he manifests his desire to exit the framework of capitalism and contract. As a sign of Bartleby's inscrutability - or the elusiveness of intention - as well as of his distinct character, the refrain demonstrates the expressive potential of boilerplate. In addition, boilerplate proves a tool of Bartleby's successful, if temporary, resistance to the broader structure of contract. At the same time, situated in a social framework that at times naturalizes inequity and inequality through contract, Bartleby's defining response is not only absorbed into the dominant language of exchange but can be seen to be derived from it. As this article reveals, \"Bartleby\" anticipates the significance and limits of contract as a vehicle of freedom in the American cultural consciousness during emancipation. (Author abstract)

Borrowing the notion of standardized terms from the language of law, The Boilerplate of Everything and the Ideal of Agreement in American Law and Literature interrogates boilerplate—a presumptively obscure form—as a paradigm of expression. Using contract as a conceptual entry-point, I reveal the significance of the ideal of agreement in American literature and legal discourse from the nineteenth century to the current era. The first part of The Boilerplate of Everything focuses on legal texts read in light of literary theory. In Chapter One, I analyze common standardized terms in contracts and argue that this type of boilerplate points to a limiting principle, creating a source of interpretive authority within a document. The contract document thereby reflects and/or manifests an ideal of agreement involving the will and intention of the parties. Chapter Two examines the use of the term “boilerplate” in judicial opinions and legal writing, presenting boilerplate as an exemplar of contractual expression that instantiates the deconstructive notion of iterability. The special conceptual status of boilerplate indicates the persistence of the ideal of genuine agreement as a legitimating origin. I thereby reveal the ongoing role of agreement as a touchstone of contract and communication in American legal discourse. The second half of the project confronts American literature corresponding with the development of contract. In Chapter Three, I identify the nineteenth-century notion and practice of contract as a significant, and previously overlooked, element of Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” I demonstrate how “Bartleby” anticipates the significance and limits of contract as an instrument of freedom in the American cultural consciousness during emancipation. Chapter Four reads Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, published contemporaneously with the first invocation of “ boilerplate ” by the Supreme Court in connection with contract. I argue that Pynchon's quintessentially postmodern work emphasizes the enduring seductiveness of the possibility of a “meeting of minds,” reinscribing it in a qualified and dynamic form. Demonstrating the expressive potential of boilerplate as well as its generative capacity to shape identity and agency, The Boilerplate of Everything illuminates the American imagination and the possibilities for individual expression, interpersonal connection and freedom.

This essay argues that the treatment of boilerplate as a distinct phenomenon in some contract scholarship sheds light on the way we imagine our social refotions. In Omri Ben-Shahar's 2007 compilation, Boilerplate: The Foundation of Market Contracts, aspects of the traditional meeting-of-the-minds model persist, notwithstanding the move away from this framework indicated by the differentiation ofboilerpfote from traditional contract. Much boilerplate scholarship is informed by a narrative of agreement as an ideal involving agency, autonomy, and meaningful choice. Thus, in an age in which form language pervades American life, a narrative of genuine agreement continues to frame a conception of contractual restions.

Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common primary malignant bone tumor in childhood. Patients who present with metastatic disease at diagnosis or relapse have a very poor prognosis, and this has not changed over the past four decades. The Wnt signaling pathway plays a role in regulating osteogenesis and is implicated in OS pathogenesis. DKK-1 inhibits the canonical Wnt signaling pathway, causing inhibition of osteoblast differentiation and disordered bone repair. Our lab previously demonstrated that a monoclonal antibody against DKK-1 prevented metastatic disease in a mouse model. This study expands upon those findings by demonstrating similar results with a small molecule inhibitor of DKK-1, WAY262611, both and . WAY262611 was evaluated on osteosarcoma cell lines, including proliferation, caspase activation, cell cycle analysis, and signaling pathway activation. We utilized our orthotopic implantation-amputation model of osteosarcoma metastasis to determine the impact of WAY262611 on primary tumor progression and metastatic outgrowth of disseminated tumor cells. Differentiation status was determined using single cell RNA sequencing. We show here that WAY262611 activates canonical Wnt signaling, enhances nuclear localization and transcriptional activity of beta-catenin, and slows proliferation of OS cell lines. We also show that WAY262611 induces osteoblastic differentiation of an OS patient-derived xenograft , as well as inhibiting metastasis. This work credentials DKK-1 as a therapeutic target in OS, allowing for manipulation of the Wnt signaling pathway and providing preclinical justification for the development of new biologics for prevention of osteosarcoma metastasis.