Professor Lauren Scholz

Lauren Scholz is currently working on a product about contract interpretation for information age contracts. Form contracts - Contracts with standardized language allowing parties to “fill in the blanks” - have existed nearly as long as contract law itself. Form contracts and boilerplate terms find their best use when longstanding practices have led to optimal language for a type of transaction or goal. Yet in the information economy, where technology and business practices develop quickly, form contracts have particular interpretation challenges. What happens when the nature of the technology or use changes dramatically from the time when the contract was initially signed? In this paper, she outlines the limits of current law to deal with this situation and suggest an alternative approach. Courts and policymakers should avoid textualist approaches to information age contracts. Instead, they should take business, technological, and social context into account when interpreting obligations. Contract doctrine and theory provides guidence.

Her research generally focuses on the intersection of technology, contract law, and privacy. Her articles have been published in many influential law reviews including William & Mary Law Review, Iowa Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, and Cardozo Law Review.

Lauren Scholz is interested in artificial intelligence’s applications to contract law and the relationship between privacy as an individual right and privacy as a collective societal good.