What the law giveth, contract may take away. Unless the law says that contracts cannot. For instance, in the common commercial code passed in nearly identical

What the law giveth, contract may take away. Unless the law says that contracts cannot. For instance, in the common commercial code passed in nearly identical form by all 50 US states, a promissory note comes with the rights of presentment and notice of dishonor baked in. The right of presentment means that the owner of the note has to show it to you when demanding payment; this ensures that you are paying the correct person, so that if the original owner of the note sells it to someone else (as it is a negotiable instrument), you won't get demands for payment from the new owner as well as the old. You can look at the note at the time of presentment and demand, to check the endorsements, paying only the last owner recorded on the note (or the bearer, if it has been converted). The right of notice of dishonor means you must be informed in a legally-conformant way if someone to whom you are legally indebted is not satisfied with a payment you have rendered. These are commonly waived on the notes backing home mortgages. Without them, the bank can put the note in a filing cabinet somewhere, and just send you a letter when they sell it to a new owner. You never see the note again, which means the finance industry can get up to all kinds of shenanigans with MERS, obfuscated ownership, and separating the beneficial ownership of the note from enforcement of the security instrument. And waiving right to notice of dishonor means that the owner can start foreclosure as soon as you miss a payment, rather than first informing you that you missed a payment. While the rights are reasonable, hiring people to carry notes around to show them and demand payment all the time would make servicing of loans much more expensive, and therefore puts an uncompetitive floor on the interest rate for notes that do not waive those rights. Waiving the rights works, but only as long as you can trust the owners to honor the system.... In the case of the confessions of judgment, the loans cannot be made profitable without them, because the default risk and average cost of litigation is too high. One might argue that we should prefer that such loans not be made at all, rather than made only with waivers of critical consumer rights, but the state of New York has decided to allow the predatory loans to exist, and to profit from them and their lenders. The borrowers bear the burden of assessing their own risks; the state will not protect them. The remedy in a representative democracy would be to vote out of office those officials that support the practice.