Real Safety AI Foundation / Research

Disability, Accessibility, and Civil Rights

The Manufactured Line: How Nexus Doctrine and Clickwrap Enforceability Deny the Disabled and the Consumer From Opposite Directions

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Working draft. Not peer reviewed.

Written
June 2026
Version
v2
Pages
14
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Abstract

This Article identifies a single doctrinal maneuver operating across two unrelated bodies of law. In disability access law, the nexus doctrine under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act treats the absence of a physical place as a reason to deny coverage to a digital service. In consumer contract and copyright law, the rule that software is licensed rather than sold treats the presence of a physical copy as insufficient to confer ownership or control, because an amendable license governs the object the buyer holds. The two rules point in opposite directions, yet they resolve in the same direction, against the person and toward the firm. The physical and digital boundary, this Article argues, is not a neutral descriptive fact that courts discover. It is a normative lever that courts and firms deploy, and its deployment tracks power rather than principle. Part III develops the disability half through the Title III circuit split. Part IV develops the consumer half through the line running from shrinkwrap enforceability to Vernor v. Autodesk. Part V draws the symmetry and argues that the boundary’s manipulability, rather than either doctrine standing alone, is the phenomenon worth naming. A short concluding Part proposes that courts treat the physical and digital line as a lever to be justified in each instance, not a fact to be honored by default.

Keywords

  • ADA Title III
  • nexus doctrine
  • public accommodation
  • clickwrap
  • first sale doctrine
  • digital ownership
  • licensed not sold
  • consumer contracts

Plain language slides

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Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "The Manufactured Line: How Nexus Doctrine and Clickwrap Enforceability Deny the Disabled and the Consumer From Opposite Directions." Real Safety AI Foundation Working Draft, June 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/manufactured-line/

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This paper is also posted on SSRN.

SSRN version

References (25)

This paper cites its sources in footnotes. Each authority is listed once, where it is first cited, with its footnote number.

  1. Footnote 3.42 U.S.C. §12182(a).
  2. Footnote 4.42 U.S.C. §12181(7).
  3. Footnote 6.Weyer v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 198 F.3d 1104, 1114 (9th Cir. 2000).
  4. Footnote 7.Robles v. Domino’s Pizza, LLC, 913 F.3d 898, 905 (9th Cir. 2019), cert. denied, 140 S. Ct. 122 (2019).
  5. Footnote 8.Magee v. Coca-Cola Refreshments USA, Inc., 833 F.3d 530, 534 (5th Cir. 2016).
  6. Footnote 9.Ford v. Schering-Plough Corp., 145 F.3d 601, 612–13 (3d Cir. 1998).
  7. Footnote 10.Gil v. Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc., 993 F.3d 1266, 1277–81 (11th Cir. 2021), vacated as moot, 21 F.4th 775 (11th Cir. 2021).
  8. Footnote 11.Carparts Distrib. Ctr., Inc. v. Auto. Wholesaler’s Ass’n of New England, 37 F.3d 12, 19 (1st Cir. 1994).
  9. Footnote 12.Doe v. Mut. of Omaha Ins. Co., 179 F.3d 557, 559 (7th Cir. 1999).
  10. Footnote 13.Aaron Perzanowski & Jason Schultz, The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy (2016).
  11. Footnote 14.ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447, 1452–53 (7th Cir. 1996).
  12. Footnote 15.Specht v. Netscape Commc’ns Corp., 306 F.3d 17, 31–32 (2d Cir. 2002).
  13. Footnote 16.Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble Inc., 763 F.3d 1171, 1178–79 (9th Cir. 2014).
  14. Footnote 17.Meyer v. Uber Techs., Inc., 868 F.3d 66, 75–80 (2d Cir. 2017).
  15. Footnote 18.Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc., 621 F.3d 1102, 1111 (9th Cir. 2010).
  16. Footnote 19.17 U.S.C. §§109(a), (d), 117(a).
  17. Footnote 20.Aaron Perzanowski & Chris Jay Hoofnagle, What We Buy When We “Buy Now”, 165 U. Pa. L. Rev. 315 (2017)
  18. Footnote 20.Luohaoran Zhu, The Vanishing Ownership: Reconstructing the First Sale Doctrine and Digital Exhaustion in the Age of Cloud Computing and NFTs, 1 L. Econ. & Soc’y 58 (2025).
  19. Footnote 21.Davidson & Assocs. v. Jung, 422 F.3d 630, 639–41 (8th Cir. 2005).
  20. Footnote 22.MDY Indus., LLC v. Blizzard Entm’t, Inc., 629 F.3d 928, 940–41 (9th Cir. 2010).
  21. Footnote 23.Péter Mezei & István Harkai, End-User Flexibilities in Digital Copyright Law: An Empirical Analysis of End-User License Agreements, 5 Interactive Ent. L. Rev. 1 (2022) (empirically analyzing the one-sided and amendable character of standard end user license agreements).
  22. Footnote 24.Douglas v. U.S. Dist. Court ex rel.
  23. Footnote 24.Talk Am., Inc., 495 F.3d 1062, 1066 (9th Cir. 2007).
  24. Footnote 25.Comb v. PayPal, Inc., 218 F. Supp. 2d 1165, 1172–73 (N.D. Cal. 2002).
  25. Footnote 26.Xiaohua Zhu & Moonhee Cho, Ownership vs. Access: Consumers’ Digital Ownership Perceptions and Preferences, 73 Aslib J. Info. Mgmt. 904 (2021).

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