4 ms·

I'm never going to argue making these things contracts is good policy, but it is in fact, the legal reality. You are focusing on one specific act here (the req

I'm never going to argue making these things contracts is good policy, but it is in fact, the legal reality. You are focusing on one specific act here (the requirement to use the seat) but your other examples are amenable to plenty of other contractual issues. For example your cinema tickets include provisions not to bring in food most of the time, or to record/reproduce the movie. They often include affirmative acts you need to perform as well (if you want to go in that direction). Sometimes minimal, sometimes not. My "don't make contracts you don't want to keep" was based on the fact that literally every reaction prior to my comment was "this is extortion" or "this is unenforceable", and it is definitely neither. People rarely think of legal consequences of anything, and that's actually fine and normal. But if we want that to be the actual legal reality, changes are needed. Those changes do not come by simply saying "This is all bullshit and stupid and unenforceable". They come by explicitly realizing they are in fact enforceable and valid, accepting that, and then making these things not contracts (which would be hard) or otherwise setting up a different regime. (For example, the non-contractual regime that exists to handle baggage liability, or in a bunch of countries, to handle compensation for being kicked off flights)

barrkel 8y ago
To be clear, unlike many people it seems, I don't disagree with the principle of differentiated pricing, because I value the upside - cheap marginal seats. And indeed I'm not disputing that tickets are contracts. I do think that it's reasonable for people to assume, up until now, that tickets are options - that if you no longer agree with the terms before you've exercised it, you can just discard the ticket. That's the only real point I wanted to make, because you made it sound as if it's obvious that tickets may reasonably come with positive obligations to exercise, and I didn't think it was obvious to non-lawyers. I found it interesting that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_cases talks about retaining the ticket being a condition for being bound by the contract, that using the ticket is equivalent to signing the document, and whether a reasonable person would have known about the terms. Sounds like there could be some edge cases in there, but I don't have the education to be enlightening.
- detaro 8y ago
  In the case from the article, the passenger claimed these terms were surprising enough to not be valid part of the contract. The court said that because price differences between combination tickets and single tickets are common and well-known it shouldn't be too surprising that the terms include a rule about this.

barrkel 8y ago

To be clear, unlike many people it seems, I don't disagree with the principle of differentiated pricing, because I value the upside - cheap marginal seats. And indeed I'm not disputing that tickets are contracts. I do think that it's reasonable for people to assume, up until now, that tickets are options - that if you no longer agree with the terms before you've exercised it, you can just discard the ticket. That's the only real point I wanted to make, because you made it sound as if it's obvious that tickets may reasonably come with positive obligations to exercise, and I didn't think it was obvious to non-lawyers. I found it interesting that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_cases talks about retaining the ticket being a condition for being bound by the contract, that using the ticket is equivalent to signing the document, and whether a reasonable person would have known about the terms. Sounds like there could be some edge cases in there, but I don't have the education to be enlightening.

detaro 8y ago
In the case from the article, the passenger claimed these terms were surprising enough to not be valid part of the contract. The court said that because price differences between combination tickets and single tickets are common and well-known it shouldn't be too surprising that the terms include a rule about this.