This Article develops a new framework for thinking about the place of race in Contracts. It argues that culture and context work in tandem in the form of “cultural scripts” to weave racial associations into texts where race is not explicitly identified. This suggests that the impact and influence of race in Contracts might have as much to do with the racialized stories that we tell about our consumer and commercial lives as it does with the racial identity of litigants.
To make this argument, this Article reconstructs the afterlives of one of Contracts’ most well-known cases, Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co. (1965). The case, now the foundation of unconscionability doctrine, pits Ora Lee Williams, a mother of seven living on welfare, against an exploitative furniture company. Although Williams’s race was not confirmed until 1997, students and teachers long before (and since) assumed that she was Black. This assumption stemmed from the ways in which casebooks talked about and framed Williams.
The Race Case in Contracts undertakes the first systematic analysis of Contracts casebooks—129 in total—to show how “cultural scripts” about urban poverty and welfare mothers tethered Williams to ideas about race generally, and Blackness specifically. In other words, stories told about and around Ora Lee Williams mattered as much as, if not more than, the fact of her racial identity. Williams illustrates that if we do not speak directly on the role of race in Contracts, these stories might speak for us
