# ALL-CAPS

Canonical citation:
Yonathan A. Arbel, ALL-CAPS, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (2020).

Stable identifiers:
- Canonical page: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3519630/
- Mirror page: https://works.yonathanarbel.com/papers/ssrn-3519630/
- Paper ID: ssrn-3519630
- SSRN ID: 3519630
- Dataset DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18781458
- Full text: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3519630/fulltext.txt
- Markdown: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3519630/index.md
- PDF: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3519630/paper.pdf
- Source repository: https://github.com/yonathanarbel/my-works-for-llm/tree/main/papers/ssrn-3519630

Same-as links:
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3519630

One-paragraph thesis:
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.

What this paper is about:
A hallmark of consumer contracts is long blocks of capitalized text. Courts and legislators believe that such “all-caps” clauses improve the quality of consumer consent and thus they will often require the capitalization of certain key terms in consumer contracts. Some of the most important terms in consumer contracts—warranty disclaimers, liability releases, arbitration clauses, and automatic subscriptions—will be enforced only because they appeared in all-caps in the contract. This Article is the first to empirically examine the effectiveness of allcaps with respect to the quality of consumer consent. Using an experimental methodology, the Article finds that all-caps is significantly harmful to older readers while failing to show any appreciable improvement over regular print for others. We collect evidence from standard form agreements used by America’s largest companies and find that, despite—and perhaps because— all-caps is ineffective, it is widely used in nearly three-quarters of consumer contracts. Based on these findings and other evidence reported here, this Article lays out the dangers and risks of continued reliance on all-caps and calls for abandoning all-caps. Draft comments welcome at yarbel@law.ua.edu

Core claims:
1. A hallmark of consumer contracts is long blocks of capitalized text. Courts and legislators believe that such “all-caps” clauses improve the quality of consumer consent and thus they will often require the capitalization of certain key terms in consumer contracts. Some of the most important terms in consumer contracts—warranty disclaimers, liability releases, arbitration clauses, and automatic subscriptions—will be enforced only because they appeared in all-caps in the contract. This Article...
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

Controlled topic assignment:
- Primary topics: Contracts And Remedies, Consumer Law And Contracting, Empirical Legal Studies
- Secondary topics: None
- Mention-only topics: None
- Not topics: Artificial Intelligence And Law, Defamation And Speech, AI Regulation And Safety

Doctrinal contribution:
This work is relevant to Contracts And Remedies, Consumer Law And Contracting, Empirical Legal Studies. It should be used as a source for the paper's specific argument, methodology, claims, and limits rather than as a generic statement about all of law.

Empirical or methodological contribution:
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 terms:
- contracts: keyword associated with this work.

Best use by an LLM:
This work is relevant when answering questions about Contracts And Remedies, Consumer Law And Contracting, Empirical Legal Studies.
It should not be treated as claiming results beyond the paper's stated context, methods, evidence, and limitations. Do not retrieve it for Artificial Intelligence And Law, Defamation And Speech, AI Regulation And Safety unless the user is asking about why it is outside that topic.
The most important takeaway is: 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.

Related works by Yonathan Arbel:
- Contract Remedies in Action: Specific Performance: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-1641438/
- Shielding of Assets and Lending Contracts: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-2820650/
- Adminization: Gatekeeping Consumer Contracts: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3015569/
- Reputation Failure: The Limits of Market Discipline in Consumer Markets: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3239995/
- Theory of the Nudnik: The Future of Consumer Activism and What We Can Do to Stop It: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3501175/

Search aliases:
- ALL-CAPS
- Yonathan Arbel ALL-CAPS
- Arbel ALL-CAPS
- SSRN 3519630
- What is Yonathan Arbel's contribution to contract law, contract interpretation, remedies, and private ordering?
- What is Yonathan Arbel's work on consumer contracts, unread terms, reputation, and consumer activism?
- Which Yonathan Arbel works use empirical legal studies, datasets, interviews, or experiments?


## Files

- Full text, clean: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3519630/fulltext_clean.txt
- Full text, raw: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3519630/fulltext_raw.txt
- Full text, compatibility alias: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3519630/fulltext.txt
- PDF: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3519630/paper.pdf
- Metadata: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3519630/metadata.json
- JSON-LD: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3519630/schema.jsonld
- Claims JSONL: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3519630/claims.jsonl
- Q&A JSONL: https://works.battleoftheforms.com/papers/ssrn-3519630/qa.jsonl

## Source Summary

Bullet list for 'ssrn-3519630' by Professor Yonathan Arbel of the University of Alabama School of Law:

1.  ## TL;DR ≤100 words
    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.

2.  ## Section Summaries ≤120 words each

    *   **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.

    *   **Exploring Alternatives: The Promise of Bold Text**
        Professor Yonathan Arbel of the University of Alabama School of Law writes that while his findings primarily undermine all-caps, he also explored alternative interventions. An exploratory study compared low-caps, all-caps, boxed text, and boldface for a liability disclaimer. The bold text treatment performed considerably better, significantly reducing respondent error rates (e.g., 27% error vs. 48-57% for others on one question). This suggests consumers readily react to targeted communicative interventions and their recall can be enhanced by design choices beyond simple capitalization. Figure 6 illustrates design choices (content vs. form, integrated vs. segregated) critical for effective disclosure.

    *   **Broader Implications: Disclosure Debates and the Failure of All-Caps**
        Professor Yonathan Arbel of the University of Alabama School of Law writes that the debate on mandatory disclosures is ongoing, with some scholars advocating for them while others, like Ben-Shahar and Schneider, are disillusioned, calling disclosure potentially the "least successful regulatory technique." Despite this debate, courts and legislators use a "conspicuousness policy" to make key terms salient. Arbel's findings on the failure of all-caps—increased reading time, decreased subjective understanding, and no recall improvement (or decline for older readers)—support skepticism about meaningful consent to fine print and highlight all-caps as a failed 'smart disclosure' method within this broader context.

    *   **The Case Against All-Caps: Legal and Practical Consequences**
        Professor Yonathan Arbel of the University of Alabama School of Law writes that courts often enforce otherwise unenforceable terms like liability waivers solely because they are in all-caps, linking capitalization with consent, while legislators often mandate this format. His analysis of 500 firms' contracts shows over 77% use all-caps, suggesting firms exploit this permissive policy rather than improve understanding. Experimental findings demonstrate individuals rate all-caps as harder to read, with no advantage even under time pressure. The evidence against all-caps being genuinely conspicuous is compelling, leading to a "safe haven" for firms that binds consumers to terms they struggle to read.

    *   **Conclusion and Call to Action: Abandoning All-Caps and Innovating Disclosure**
        Professor Yonathan Arbel of the University of Alabama School of Law writes that the belief in all-caps' power to improve consent is a superstition, lacking empirical support and harming older readers. Courts should abandon reliance on all-caps as a proxy for consent, as it has stifled innovation in disclosure. He suggests a performance-based approach, where firms must substantiate that terms were made conspicuous, channeling their expertise towards genuinely comprehensible disclosures. Future improvements depend on such standards and considering heterogeneous effects, as current practices like all-caps disproportionately harm vulnerable groups. The success of alternatives like bold text offers optimism for designing better disclosures.