# ALL-CAPS — one-page summary

**Paper ID:** `ssrn-3519630`
**Year:** 2020
**Author(s):** Yonathan Arbel
**SSRN:** https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3519630

## TL;DR

Professor Yonathan Arbel of the University of Alabama School of Law argues that the widespread legal practice of using all-caps in consumer contracts to ensure key terms are conspicuous and consent is improved is deeply flawed. His empirical research demonstrates that all-caps text fails to enhance consumer understanding, provides no benefits for most readers, and significantly harms the comprehension of older individuals. Arbel calls for abandoning this unsubstantiated tradition and exploring more effective disclosure methods.

## Key Sections (from `summary.md`)

- **The Misguided Reliance on All-Caps:** Professor Yonathan Arbel of the University of Alabama School of Law writes that courts and legislators mistakenly believe all-caps clauses in consumer contracts enhance consent, often mandating them for enforceability. He asserts this practice is a deeply misguided instance of "contract lore," an ungrounded belief among lawyers, especially problematic given consumers often don't read fine print. Arbel argues that if all-caps doesn't improve consent, or worsens it, courts may be wrongly enforcing harsh terms based on an illusion of understanding, depriving consumers of recourse. This legal tradition lacks empirical support for its effectiveness.
- **The "No-Reading Problem" and Conspicuousness Mandates:** Professor Yonathan Arbel of the University of Alabama School of Law writes that the "no-reading problem," where consumers' ignorance of fine print allows firms to include oppressive terms, undermines contractual consent. A common solution adopted by courts and legislators, such as the UCC's requirement for conspicuous warranty waivers, is to mandate the prominent display of important terms. This strategy aims to improve consumer consent by signaling the importance of key provisions and making them more accessible, with all-caps being a widely endorsed method to achieve such conspicuousness and thereby enhance enforceability.
- **Prevalence and Unquestioned Tradition of All-Caps:** Professor Yonathan Arbel of the University of Alabama School of Law writes that the legal convention of using all-caps to denote consent lacks empirical support; early psychological studies indicating it impeded reading were overlooked. His new research analyzing 500 popular consumer contracts from highly visited websites like Google and Amazon reveals its pervasiveness, with over 77% containing at least one fully capitalized paragraph and 9% of all words capitalized. This prevalence in contracts affecting most American adults is troubling, as the policy is based on speculation rather than evidence of its actual effectiveness.
- **Experimental Findings: All-Caps Fails to Improve Consent and Harms Older Readers:** Professor Yonathan Arbel of the University of Alabama School of Law writes that his lab experiments with approximately 570 participants tested whether all-caps improves consumer consent, specifically their ability to recall contract terms. The findings show all-caps fails to improve recall and provides no appreciable benefit. Crucially, the evidence demonstrates all-caps is significantly harmful to older readers (over 55), nearly doubling their error rate, and likely fails to improve consent for others. This detrimental effect on older readers may be due to impeded readability, as all-caps homogenizes letter shapes. The "fire siren" theory, suggesting all-caps signals onerous terms, was also rejected.
- **Experimental Findings: All-Caps Under Time Pressure and Subjective Difficulty:** Professor Yonathan Arbel of the University of Alabama School of Law writes that further experiments explored all-caps under time pressure and its subjective perception. When reading contracts under strict time limits, subjects reading all-caps showed no improvement in recall, while those reading lower-case text performed better as pressure increased. This weighs against the theory that capitalization increases text salience. Moreover, self-reported data from another study indicated respondents found all-caps contracts significantly harder to read (by 22%) and also rated them harder to understand (by 13%), challenging the notion that capitalization improves accessibility or comprehension.

## Keywords

contracts; AI; law

## Files

- Full text: `papers/ssrn-3519630/paper.txt`
- PDF: `papers/ssrn-3519630/paper.pdf`
- Summary (EN): `papers/ssrn-3519630/summary.md`
- Summary (ZH): `papers/ssrn-3519630/summary.zh.md`

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