Unless you think we need to slash contract law for labor, housing, and finance to allow 40% interest loans with people's fridge contents as collateral or workers getting sucked into chicken nugget processors, it's clear that contracts have to be regulated to stop abuses by powerful parties. At some point a service becomes an important part of life for its user and for society. The alternative to signing these contracts is to pay exorbitant amounts for mostly legacy physical media and live without connection to the wider world. If we consider something like email, you'd genuinely be set back in a way that would affect your life if you didn't choose one or another service. Is there any realistic course other than government action to stop Google from reading my emails?
I'll give my take: There's a right and proper way to live life and treat your customers, bargain with merchants, rule over your subjects, obey authorities, raise a family, etc. The rule of law, including contracts, are only useful in so far as they define the good paths through life. Laws are useless when they obscure common sense and try to twist arms for individual benefit.
If we set all our words in stone, I'd be a million dollars in brother to my debt for a bag of candy. Scrolling through ten pages of terms, I feel the same way I did then. I don't get paid to read contracts. I don't have any colleagues giving me advice. I've never even seen a judge, how would I ever guess their reaction to a certain line?
There's a proper way to treat users and customers. No one actually believes a license is better than ownership, they're just screwing us for power and control. I'll never acknowledge the superiority of a system which isn't able to implement the simple solution to such greed.
Baseline assumption of the contract law is both that the contracts will be enforced and that the enforcement will be fair. If we seek to fix any issues with those contracts that arise, we need to look beyond to courts, to culture and powrr dynamics playing out, as those will give rise to whatever terms are proposed. In line with caveat emptor, these then should be challenged prior to entering, ideally where it moves to bargaining, but we should not be compelled to enter into these, and perhaps that's what some people point to - circumstantial factors mean unfavourable terms are sometimes accepted as no viable alternatives are present (say bad tenancies that are accepted under threat of being homeless, etc).
In respect to digital TOS, similarly, these should be challenged prior to entering, but that requires cultural change and a certain critical mass of people, and far too many accept things unknowingly, hoping for the best.
That is not the basic assumption of contract law. The basic assumption is that they will be enforced and beneficial for each party. Fairness in contracting is extremely hard to pin down in many cases, especially when they are niche. Courts regularly ignore the fairness of a contract for that reason, except in cases where its gross unfairness is raised as a defense to contract (illegality/unconscionability/public policy) and in those cases Courts only grant the defense if a very high standard of unfairness is met, such that no reasonable person would have entered into the contract.
Challenging ToS would require a major rewrite of contract law, which as I've stated is not realistic. You don't get to challenge the terms of a common law contract; that's the Mirror Image rule and if you try to challenge a common law contract then that's considered a rejection as a matter of law. Like I said in my article, the only realistic way of change is via the Legislature since they are the only ones with the power for that. Such change would realistically only occur as limits to what terms can be in the ToS, character limits to the ToS, etc. and not changes to the actual common law itself.
It doesn't matter what the terms are of a contract, nor the equities, nor the laws, nor the facts, the only thing that matters in court is what the judge wants to do, which is *entirely* determined by their perception of the relative power and status of the litigants. E.g. tenant always loses against landlord, no matter what. If a landlord breaks the lease every month by refusing to accept the rent on the lease, demanding substantially more and refusing to refund the difference, using an illegal lease drafted by a racketeering cartel of landlords, modified in handwriting to be even more illegal when the tenant had to choose between homelessness and taking whatever terms offered, files for eviction when all rent due is paid, files again for overstaying the lease when the lease is still in effect, without a move-out notice and even before the lease continues month to month, files false documents claiming no answer by tenant when his answer is in the court record, the apartment complex is a slum full of illegal immigrants, mold and roaches, the tenant has paid everything the lease specifies and more, the landlord has reneged on promises to lease an appropriate apartment to the tenant, who became disabled during the lease, instead extorting the tenant to continue to rent an uninhabitable 3rd-floor apartment, the landlord knowing that other landlords will not lease to him because of his disability and consequent loss of income, as well as the abusive and illegal eviction attempted by the landlord. Despite all that being documented and presented properly in court proceedings, including around 20 counts of several types of felonies by the landlord, including perjury on the stand which was acknowledged by the judge, it made no difference, landlord wins. Stop believing in law, or courts or judges, they are of their father the Devil, the father of lies, and should be shunned as the wicked and hell-bound moral monsters they are.
Realistically both parties are usually not very good. Tenants tend to destroy their apartments and landlords don't always maintain them.
That being said, based off of what I've heard I think tenants tend to be worse. Nick Rochefort (friend of Sam Hyde) has some really funny stories about his time as a landlord and he tells everyone to not bother with it most of the time.
Judges have absolute immunity, there is no penalty to them for collaborating in crimes. (That one in my first comment did suffer nearly two hours of being eldered by me in the Quaker meetinghouse.)
The youngest court of final appeals judge of the 20th-century English-speaking world invited me to be his law partner; he only had two partners at different times. If you don't want the benefit of my experience, that's on you.
The Board of Professional Responsibility would disagree.
Even if that was true I would imagine he only did so to keep you around as some sort of court jester. You seem like someone who got shafted in a divorce settlement and blame all judges for this fact. You have an infantile view of the legal system, regardless of what experience you may or may not have. It is utterly childish in the most literal way possible.
Unless you think we need to slash contract law for labor, housing, and finance to allow 40% interest loans with people's fridge contents as collateral or workers getting sucked into chicken nugget processors, it's clear that contracts have to be regulated to stop abuses by powerful parties. At some point a service becomes an important part of life for its user and for society. The alternative to signing these contracts is to pay exorbitant amounts for mostly legacy physical media and live without connection to the wider world. If we consider something like email, you'd genuinely be set back in a way that would affect your life if you didn't choose one or another service. Is there any realistic course other than government action to stop Google from reading my emails?
I'll give my take: There's a right and proper way to live life and treat your customers, bargain with merchants, rule over your subjects, obey authorities, raise a family, etc. The rule of law, including contracts, are only useful in so far as they define the good paths through life. Laws are useless when they obscure common sense and try to twist arms for individual benefit.
If we set all our words in stone, I'd be a million dollars in brother to my debt for a bag of candy. Scrolling through ten pages of terms, I feel the same way I did then. I don't get paid to read contracts. I don't have any colleagues giving me advice. I've never even seen a judge, how would I ever guess their reaction to a certain line?
There's a proper way to treat users and customers. No one actually believes a license is better than ownership, they're just screwing us for power and control. I'll never acknowledge the superiority of a system which isn't able to implement the simple solution to such greed.
"in brother to my debt" perhaps I oughta head my blow off
Baseline assumption of the contract law is both that the contracts will be enforced and that the enforcement will be fair. If we seek to fix any issues with those contracts that arise, we need to look beyond to courts, to culture and powrr dynamics playing out, as those will give rise to whatever terms are proposed. In line with caveat emptor, these then should be challenged prior to entering, ideally where it moves to bargaining, but we should not be compelled to enter into these, and perhaps that's what some people point to - circumstantial factors mean unfavourable terms are sometimes accepted as no viable alternatives are present (say bad tenancies that are accepted under threat of being homeless, etc).
In respect to digital TOS, similarly, these should be challenged prior to entering, but that requires cultural change and a certain critical mass of people, and far too many accept things unknowingly, hoping for the best.
That is not the basic assumption of contract law. The basic assumption is that they will be enforced and beneficial for each party. Fairness in contracting is extremely hard to pin down in many cases, especially when they are niche. Courts regularly ignore the fairness of a contract for that reason, except in cases where its gross unfairness is raised as a defense to contract (illegality/unconscionability/public policy) and in those cases Courts only grant the defense if a very high standard of unfairness is met, such that no reasonable person would have entered into the contract.
Challenging ToS would require a major rewrite of contract law, which as I've stated is not realistic. You don't get to challenge the terms of a common law contract; that's the Mirror Image rule and if you try to challenge a common law contract then that's considered a rejection as a matter of law. Like I said in my article, the only realistic way of change is via the Legislature since they are the only ones with the power for that. Such change would realistically only occur as limits to what terms can be in the ToS, character limits to the ToS, etc. and not changes to the actual common law itself.
It doesn't matter what the terms are of a contract, nor the equities, nor the laws, nor the facts, the only thing that matters in court is what the judge wants to do, which is *entirely* determined by their perception of the relative power and status of the litigants. E.g. tenant always loses against landlord, no matter what. If a landlord breaks the lease every month by refusing to accept the rent on the lease, demanding substantially more and refusing to refund the difference, using an illegal lease drafted by a racketeering cartel of landlords, modified in handwriting to be even more illegal when the tenant had to choose between homelessness and taking whatever terms offered, files for eviction when all rent due is paid, files again for overstaying the lease when the lease is still in effect, without a move-out notice and even before the lease continues month to month, files false documents claiming no answer by tenant when his answer is in the court record, the apartment complex is a slum full of illegal immigrants, mold and roaches, the tenant has paid everything the lease specifies and more, the landlord has reneged on promises to lease an appropriate apartment to the tenant, who became disabled during the lease, instead extorting the tenant to continue to rent an uninhabitable 3rd-floor apartment, the landlord knowing that other landlords will not lease to him because of his disability and consequent loss of income, as well as the abusive and illegal eviction attempted by the landlord. Despite all that being documented and presented properly in court proceedings, including around 20 counts of several types of felonies by the landlord, including perjury on the stand which was acknowledged by the judge, it made no difference, landlord wins. Stop believing in law, or courts or judges, they are of their father the Devil, the father of lies, and should be shunned as the wicked and hell-bound moral monsters they are.
Not reading this rest of this comment because of how retarded the first sentence was.
"tenants are the good guys and landlords are the bad guys" is socialist morality.
Realistically both parties are usually not very good. Tenants tend to destroy their apartments and landlords don't always maintain them.
That being said, based off of what I've heard I think tenants tend to be worse. Nick Rochefort (friend of Sam Hyde) has some really funny stories about his time as a landlord and he tells everyone to not bother with it most of the time.
Not responsive.
Judges have absolute immunity, there is no penalty to them for collaborating in crimes. (That one in my first comment did suffer nearly two hours of being eldered by me in the Quaker meetinghouse.)
The youngest court of final appeals judge of the 20th-century English-speaking world invited me to be his law partner; he only had two partners at different times. If you don't want the benefit of my experience, that's on you.
The Board of Professional Responsibility would disagree.
Even if that was true I would imagine he only did so to keep you around as some sort of court jester. You seem like someone who got shafted in a divorce settlement and blame all judges for this fact. You have an infantile view of the legal system, regardless of what experience you may or may not have. It is utterly childish in the most literal way possible.
Uh, the "absolute immunity" for judges that you refer to is from torts arising from official duties, not criminal law or personal life.