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Read or understand? This is legalese we're talking about.

Understanding is beyond the scope of what I'd like to see fixed in contract law. The idea is that if you have a 5 page contract, it should have taken at least 8 minutes[1] to read regardless of if it is legalease or written in a plain style.

It's a lower bound. Failure to satisfy that bound can then be seen as prima facie evidence that the has not been a "meeting of the minds", due to one party being given sufficient time to even read the contract.

As I tried to imply, there are various configurable details here that would need to be negotiated; I just believe that some sort of minimum bound should be established in law. The alternative is to allow the current trend of de facto contracts of adhesion to grow.

[1] or whatever the length of time is calculated to be - I just made up this number

So effectively, the individual signing must spend 8 minutes doing nothing but looking at the contract (even if they are daydreaming). I can see where this is would be a concrete improvement, even if just a minor one to a much larger problem.

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