Duncan Kennedy, Harvard Law School, has posted The Bitter Ironies of Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co. in the First Year Law School Curriculum, which appears in the Buffalo Law Review:
This article severely criticizes the way first-year law teachers and casebook writers teach the famous case of Williams vs. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co. The court granted relief to a poor Black woman, living on welfare in a poor neighborhood of the District of Columbia in 1965, who had signed a series of one-sided credit sale contracts for household goods. The case has stood, against the intention of the holding, for the conventional wisdom that the regulation of terms in consumer contracts hurts the people it is supposed to help (Part I and II). The second part of the article presents in strictly conventional neo-classical welfare economic terms the better, although still only marginally accepted, position that the consequences are variable depending on the configuration of the market in question (Part III). The third part collects the surprisingly large amount of data available about the market and the specific transaction in Williams. It shows that given the exploitative character of the seller/lender’s sales practices, it is overwhelmingly likely that banning the clause in question benefited Ms. Williams at the expense of Walker-Thomas (Part IV and V). The conclusion argues for the relevance of the analysis to today’s analogous consumer credit abuses.--Dan Ernst
