Research Summary: Generative Gap Filling

A recent study challenges the long-held assumption that contractual gaps, when unresolvable by textual interpretation, provide insufficient evidence for courts to determine original intent. Research involving masked contractual terms found that lay respondents could accurately predict the removed term approximately 50% of the time, suggesting that remaining contract text often contains more implicit information about the parties' original bargain than previously understood.

Why it matters

This research provides a new perspective on contract interpretation and dispute resolution. It suggests that more systematic approaches might be developed to discern original intent from incomplete contractual documents, potentially reducing reliance on external commercial defaults or judicial policy preferences. This could lead to more predictable and consistent outcomes in contract enforcement.

Key insights

• Contract litigation frequently involves agreements that do not perfectly document party intentions.
• When textual interpretation is insufficient, courts typically 'fill the gap' in contracts.
• A long-standing assumption in legal scholarship is that remaining contract text offers limited insight into the specific disputed term.
• The study empirically tested this assumption by masking negotiated terms in real contracts and asking respondents to predict them.
• Lay respondents successfully predicted the hidden term around 50% of the time, which is double the expected rate under the traditional assumption.
• This finding suggests that contracts implicitly contain more information about omitted terms than previously theorized.

Source

arXiv — Computers and Society — https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21401