On Dec 12, 2022, at 10:48 AM, Jack Enman-Beech <jenmanbeech@gmail.com> wrote:

The first answer is going to be Alan Wertheimer's Exploitation. Rick Bigwood's Exploitative Contracts is also what it sounds like. These are probably the sort of thing you want, although you will get a different and perhaps better answer outside of private law theory (if for example you ask feminists or Marxists).

On Mon, Dec 12, 2022 at 6:41 PM Nate Oman <nate.oman@gmail.com> wrote:

Greetings,

I have what I hope is not a terribly naive or obtuse question. In discussions of justice in contractual relations, one frequently sees commentators and less occasionally courts refer to exploitation or the idea that a particular contract is exploitive.  Can anyone point toward theoretical literature that tries to rigorously set out the idea of exploitation?  What does it mean for a contract to be exploitive and why exactly is that wrong?

I am not talking about theories of unconscionability so much as the specific idea of exploitation.  It seems like a ubiquitous building block in a lot of normative arguments about contract law, but when I think about it it always seems to be a Potter-Stewart-on-obscenity ("I know it when I see it") kind of concept.

I am hoping that I am just revealing my bibliographic ignorance here, and someone can point me toward some rigorous treatments of the idea.

Best wishes,

Nate

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nathan B. Oman
Rollins Professor of Law 

William & Mary Law School
P.O. Box 8795
Williamsburg, VA 23187

"We lived in the hope that, if we survived and were good, God would
allow us to become pirates."  --Mark Twain

--

John Enman-Beech

Lecturer in the Law of Contract

King's College London, Dickson Poon School of Law