“Mandated disclosure” is a regulatory technique that is much used but little remarked. It aspires to improve decisions people make in their economic and social relationships and particularly to protect the naïve from the sophisticated. The technique requires “the discloser” to give “the disclosee” information which the disclosee may use to make better decisions and to keep the discloser from abusing its superior position.

For example: You are shopping for a loan. Or told you need prostate cancer surgery. Or buying a computer online. Or under arrest and undergoing questioning. You have never faced this choice before. It turns on information you do not know. Mortgagees, doctors, vendors, and police are experienced and have interests of their own.

Mandated disclosure is supposed to give you information for analyzing your choices critically and to choose optimally. Thus, truth-in-lending laws require your lender to highlight credit terms. The law of informed consent requires your doctor to describe prostatectomies, radiation, chemotherapy, and watchful waiting. Contract doctrine requires your vendor to reveal its contract’s terms, like warranties and mandatory arbitration. Miranda requires police to tell you your rights. Thus informed, you understand your choices well enough to make an intelligent decision about your credit, your cancer, your computer, or your confession.

Mandated disclosure is ubiquitous. Innumerable federal and state statutes, municipal ordinances, administrative regulations, and court rulings demand sometimes marvelously elaborate disclosures from businesses that issue car, student, or other consumer loans; mortgagees; home-equity lenders; credit card companies; banks accepting deposits; mutual funds; securities brokers; credit-reporting agencies; investment advisors; ATM operators; pawnshops; payday lenders; rent-to-own dealers; installment-sales vendors; insurers of property, health, life, cars or rented vehicles, self-storage facilities, and much else; car-towing companies; car repair shops; motor clubs; residential real estate agencies, developers, and landlords; time-share programs; sellers and lessors of mobile homes; membership camping facilities; providers of home improvements, services, and repairs; home-alarm installers; vocational schools; traffic schools; agents selling electricity; immigration consultants; dog breeders and sellers; travel services and travel agencies; art dealers; police; doctors; hospitals; managed care organizations; colleges and universities; restaurants and other food establishments; halal-food dealers; and endlessly more. To say nothing, for example, of the common law obligation to disclose information prior to a contract, or federal and state campaign finance regulation, which the Supreme Court recently trimmed to little more than mandated disclosure.

Mandated disclosure addresses a real problem: modernity showers us with consequential and complex decisions about which we know little. Unsophisticated people must work with, depend on, and contend with, specialized enterprises that expertly handle complex transactions. People must manage financial matters of many kinds. They face medical choices. They buy things whose mechanisms they do not understand and whose quality they cannot evaluate under terms they do not know.

The Failure of Mandated Disclosure