3 ms·

What's the deal with ALL CAPS PARTS in certain legal documents, anyway? It can't possibly carry any legal weight...?

• jacalata 10y ago
  I saw someone say once that it is done to fulfil a legal obligation to make certain clauses obvious and noticeable, or a similar phrasing in contract law.
• brownbat 10y ago
  The Universal Commercial Code requires some terms be "conspicuous" in transactions, and says you can satisfy that requirement with all caps text of equal or greater size than the nearby text. There are some other options, like changing color or alternate fonts, but those are generally just more complicated.[0] An example of a contract term that must be conspicuous is selling something "as is," ie, claiming no warranty that the thing even works at all.[1] A note on Universal Codes - nonprofits, usually mostly made up of lawyers, will write model codes for state laws and then try to get them passed in each state so that state laws are predictable. Almost all states have adopted some provisions from the UCC, but several states have adopted modified versions or old revisions.[2] [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/1/1-201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/1/1-201 [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/article2 https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/article2 [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Act
  • jdietrich 10y ago
    >There are some other options, like changing color or alternate fonts, but those are generally just more complicated. The all caps thing is a holdover from the era of typewriters. On most typewriters, switching to bold face required changing the daisywheel or type ball; alternate colours would be lost on xerox- or carbon-copied documents. All caps was the most convenient option. It's now a vestigial convention, like the floppy disk save icon.
    • JupiterMoon 10y ago
      Software licences are often written in plain text. There is no bold and no colour in asci text so uppercase is the only option.