33 ms·
Justice Stevens reads the fine print
- tomas_nort 5y ago
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Suppose a passenger boards a cruise at a port in the United States. The boat then sails from one destination to another, often among multiple countries, through international waters. This raises two questions: what law applies to the boat and people on it, and where can they bring a legal claim if needed? > For the boat itself, there is a long and boring answer pertaining to the maritime law of the country where the ship is flagged. > But for the passengers, the answer is simple: the ticket is a contract, and these provisions are part of the contract terms. The choice of law provision determines which jurisdiction’s laws apply; the choice of forum provision determines where cases can be heard. I don't see how this can be the answer. Suppose... (1) My mother (an American national) books a ticket on an international cruise. (2) A stowaway on the ship (a French national) murders her. (3) I would like to make some sort of claim against the murderer. The obvious action open to me under American law is a suit for wrongful death. But my question here is... why would the cruise ship's ticket terms govern the legal situation? My mother was a party to the contract. But the stowaway wasn't. The ticket terms would only appear to be relevant if I want to sue the cruise line. But I want to sue the murderer.
- zdragnar 5y agoIf it was an either-or situation, odds are, you would be better off holding the cruise line responsible for failing to secure the boat and its passengers. Even if you could sue the murderer, you wouldn't get as much money, and civil suits in the US don't send people to jail.
- abduhl 5y agoThe murderer is a stowaway and not bound by a contract they never signed. You would sue them under the applicable jurisdiction which, with maritime law, is incredibly complicated. You may not be able to sue the murderer at all depending on where the ship is registered. The point of the case the article talks about is the enforceability of contracts between two parties with respect to choice of law/forum even when they’re almost contracts of adhesion. If you don’t sign the contract (or the other party doesn’t sign the contract) then it’s not relevant to your situation.
- dervjd 5y agoThey wouldn’t - the contract is between you and the cruise line only. The ticket contract’s forum/choice of law clause would have zero impact. However, unless your stowaway murderer has assets that could be used to satisfy a judgment against them, any half decent attorney would also want to sue the cruise line as well for their culpability in allowing a stowaway on board (and the provision would apply).
- paxys 5y agoRelated to the opening of this article – it is interesting to see how one can get completely soured on certain products or experiences because, by virtue of their profession, they see the dirty underbelly of how things in that industry actually work. Someone who has read cruise contracts in detail will never want to go on one. Cooks with experience in commercial kitchens never want to eat at a restaurant again. Someone who is familiar with standards of bridge inspections in most towns hesitates every time they drive over one. A computer security expert keeps their most valuable information under lock and key in a physical safe rather than online. My conclusion ultimately is – everything is running on goodwill and duct tape, and ignorance is bliss.
- KarlKemp 5y agoOne of those hypotheses is easily testable: bridges can collapse and you will hear about it. And yet.. it rarely happens? There was one in Italy and one in the US recently but, to a decent approximation, it’s a non-issue. Maybe we should have more trust in people and their work. Maybe our bridges are fine, our food is kosher, but what’s rotting on the inside is society, eaten alive by cynicism and distrust.
- jkepler 5y agoBridges are usually massively over-engineered for safety.
- actionfromafar 5y agoNot over, just engineered. That's what safety is. I don't mean to be snarky, the built-in buffer is part of what makes it safe.
- yakak 5y agoThat sounds like the road to complacency. The reality is that there are many backup systems that work much of the time. Have complacency in all of them and forget society. The bridge has engineers and architects who know material stats and add tolerances. The restaurant has patrons with immune systems that survived worse times in human history, usually, unless the patron is undergoing serious medical treatment or something.
- drewcoo 5y agoJustice Brandeis says a thing: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2016/05/27/justice-louis-brandeis https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2016/05/27/justice-louis-bra...
- drewcoo 5y ago[flagged]
- vxNsr 5y agoCare to explain the relevance aside from this also being about a SCOTUS justice? Your description is exceeding vague, and I don’t have a ton of time to listen to a NPR story though from the description it seems like it’s just a general discussion about his life.
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y agoOff topic question but can anyone explain this baby/toddler talk "did a thing" / "said a thing" meme that is spreading lately? I hear it at work from some of my dev team and just curious if I'm missing some sarcastic/jokey reference every time it's being said.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nerdponx 5y agoIt's a rhetorical device. Babies wouldn't understand it. When used in earnest, it tends to sound breathless and dramatic, probably because that's how trashy journalists use it in headlines. It tends to be used as a kind of statement of passive resignation. It's deliberately the most colorless, blandest, simplest way to possibly express the idea that it expresses. Whereas you might otherwise say "well that's new" or "ugh, I forgot about X", you might say "that's a thing." It also seems to be somewhat of a recurring meme, I remember reading an article showing how this "a thing" phrase makes the rounds every couple of decades. I think there are some really ugly phrases out there now ("ask" as a noun instead of "request" or "task" is kind of nauseating). But lighten up a little bit, some people like to have fun when they speak. Think of it like absurdist humor, rather than baby talk. I know it's trendy in some circles to claim that adults have become infantilized or whatever, but I don't think that's what's happening here.
- graycat 5y ago> ... is fully and fairly notified about the existence ... I'm not a lawyer, but recently I did watch the movie Legally Blond (recently for free at YouTube) where the character Elle Woods on her first day of Harvard Law School was sent out of a class for being "unprepared", that is, not having read 41 pages on "jurisdiction" or some such. Well, Ms. Woods might have responded to the professor that she did nothing wrong and, thus, should not be sent out of class and all that because she was not "fully and fairly notified" of the existence of the assignment. I thought of that while watching the movie (likely the movie audience was not supposed to think of such things!), but it is nice now to see none other than Justice Stevens make clear the importance of "fully and fairly". Might have been cute in the movie for the character Ms. Woods to raise such an objection that she was not notified!
- markdown 5y ago> recently I did watch the movie Legally Blond (recently for free at YouTube) OT, but what do you mean? Is youtube showing full movies now, or was this a pirate upload?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- graycat 5y agoYouTube now has maybe several dozens, maybe more, of full movies available to watch for free "with ads". Where they got the movies, I have no idea. If click around enough at YouTube, can get a Web page that lists just movies, all or nearly all for free and the rest "for rent". In my experience, the operation of downloading a movie, or any video being played in a Web browser, at least with the software tools I have, to a file is touchy, slow, unreliable, etc. but at times works, but I was able to download, from somewhere, Sargent York. Also I was able to buy on DVD the original King Kong. Both of these two old movies show, at least to my eyes, that the basic craft of drama, story telling, and, really, movie making was plenty advanced by the time of those two movies (the 1930s). For "York" busy movie music composer Max Steiner in places was plenty dramatic. From such old movies, I have liked the examples of the basic craft of movie making with simpler and easier to understand movies that don't do nearly as much as a lot of more recent movies with special effects. My guess is that most of what is important in making a movie popular is the basic craft and not the rest, and in my judgment the craft has not improved much since the best work of the 1930s. Maybe this observation is just Film School 101. Yes, current computer based special effects are amazing, but that is only an indirect approach to the main goal of the basic craft, insight into humans. Having at least some understanding of the "basic craft" is somewhat relevant to my Internet startup. Sure, in school I was a STEM field major and refused to take literature seriously. But at times literature tries to address a serious subject -- humans. Literature does not always do well with that subject, but neither do the STEM fields. To my eyes, sometimes literature, ..., and movies actually do well in some respects with humans, at times good enough to take seriously in the goal of understanding humans.
- encryptluks2 5y agoUnfortunately the Supreme court has become more and more pro-corporations, which means that buying a car or getting a job is a lengthy one-sided legal contract likely waiving your right to trial by an elected judge, trial by jury, choice of forum/law, and arbitration costs that are significantly higher than if you were to go through a regular court. Of course the company has already picked the venue and arbitration company that is most favorable to them.
- MarkSweep 5y agoThere has been some minor progress on this front. Arbitration agreements are no longer enforceable if you are sexually harassed or assaulted: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4445?s=7&r=11 https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4445... A 20% of the house voted no on it and several Congress critters said in hearings that arbitration agreements are fine because they “voluntarily entered into”. So a lot of Congress people unabashedly serve corporations.
- willcipriano 5y agoA lot of Congress people also engage in sexual harassment: https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/16/politics/settlements-congress-sexual-harassment/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/16/politics/settlements-congress...
- NationalPark 5y agoHere are the details of the vote if anyone else is curious (I was having trouble finding this on the official page): https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/117-2022/h33 https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/117-2022/h33 335 - 97 - 2. Ds voted yea on party lines, Rs split 113 - 97 (plus 2 not voting)
- derbOac 5y agoI'd be curious if there's a way to characterize "the prototypic expected human" as implicitly reflected in SCOTUS decisions and how that changes over time. For example, this decision implies people are expected to read the volumes of fine print on a ticket before they purchase it. Seems like if you decontextualized things it might point to absurdities in current law or its interpretation. I think many decisions are affected by certain kinds of hindsight cognitive biases that distort interpretation of context.
- dna_polymerase 5y agoSeeing the domain and the title I was wondering at first what the article had to do with typography. Mr. Buttericks guide on practical typography is an must read for everyone in print- and webdesign: https://practicaltypography.com/ https://practicaltypography.com/
- ivanche 5y agoOMG, that’s him! No wonder this site looks simply beautiful. Also, he wrote a book on typography for lawyers: https://typographyforlawyers.com/ https://typographyforlawyers.com/
- nerdponx 5y agoIt's funny, I showed this website to a lawyer and his response was "that's nice, but everyone uses Times New Roman in Word so that's what I have to use. My job is to write and edit, not to make things pretty. I don't see what the point is." So here I am, a data scientist and software engineer, reading his book purely out of hobby interest, while actual attorneys have no use for it. I suppose things are different when you are in private practice and presumably work on smaller deals with fewer numbers of people involved in editing the documents.
- lordnacho 5y agoSomeone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex. It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that type of stuff. It's basically impossible to read the docs for all the services you buy, and even if you did you wouldn't know what it meant in terms of law. Yet we have lawyers talking through the technical minutiae as if they are source code. There's a huge disconnect between what people understand their rights and legal positions to be, and what the lawyers can turn it into. There's other problems as well. At least here in the UK, the court system does not have enough capacity. This leads to all sorts of problems with who gets justice. Then there's the money. If we're all equal before the law, how can there be lawyers who cost thousands an hour? Either they're more effective than other lawyers, in which case we're not all equal under the law, or they're just as good as any other lawyer, in which case they are just good marketers. I'm sure it's a mix of both, but if we cared that everyone had equal access, why wouldn't there simply be a big bench of lawyers from which you get assigned one? The legal system has somehow managed to both be a social good and a tremendous source of profit for its members. (Well, some of its members, they don't all make piles of cash.)
- noduerme 5y agoThe answer according to my family: Get a law degree. I'm the only one who doesn't have one / hasn't passed a bar exam. If you don't want to be victim of that system, treat being a lawyer as a form of hacking. It's no different than being a victim of dark pattern software practices, which you would be if you didn't know how to code. (Ironically, part of my slot involves helping lawyers get around pitfalls in software).
- noduerme 5y agoBeing from a family of lawyers, I was always told that fine print on documents you didn't sign or initial essentially has no weight in court. I'm not a lawyer and I've never tested this hypothesis personally, but I tend to disregard it as something that wouldn't hold up if I had a valid claim.
- vmception 5y agoGood to be skeptical of that idea, courts consider many forms of consent contractual as long as they can be accepted as proof of consent. Periodically, a jurisdiction may explicitly specify that a certain form of consent is necessary, presumably to unbog their court system. Secondly, a lot of fine print benefits you. missed out on crazy compensation during a minor inconvenience just because you skipped locking in provable consent to the contract? oops
- RugnirViking 5y ago> a lot of fine print benefits you I'd love it if you could give examples, preferably more than one. Because most people's view of "fine print" is that it is invariably out to screw you over as hard as possible.
- massysett 5y agoIt allows Carnival Cruise Lines to operate cheaply. Cruises depend on cheap labor and low costs. This brings affordable cruise vacations to the masses, as well as employment opportunities in the industry. There are vacation alternatives, such as land-based resorts. But they tend to be more expensive.
- noduerme 5y agoThe downside to cheapening every experience for the masses is that you then have to create some kind of extraordinarily untouchable / "aspirational" product for the rich. I thought it was better when flying, taking cruises, or going to Vegas were things accessible to the everyman, but which people had to really earn. As a result, they looked their best, dressed their best, and were on their best behavior. Everyone who simply needed to get somewhere could take a bus or a train. People who wanted a dumpy vacation could drive to Disneyland. Turning middle-class totems like a once-a-year flight or once-in-ten-years cruise into a situation where 90% of it is sold as herd steerage with markups for barely better "business class" or whatever, had this one perverse effect: It separated the truly rich from the middle class, once and for all. For although the upper-upper-middle class still fly Business or First, the upper class only fly in private jets and no longer interact with the middle or lower class whatsoever. The distance between coach and business became a chasm between a commercial flight and a private jet. It would be cool to start a middle class airline, or cruise, where everything was just expensive enough to make people act civilized. >> There are vacation alternatives, such as land-based resorts. But they tend to be more expensive. Yeah, then again, after watching "White Lotus" I guess we're just completely fucked. No one acts civilized anymore.
- blunte 5y agoFine print or not, most people (myself included) rarely if ever read the "fine print". If you did read the fine print, and you were of a problem-solving (pessimist) mentality, then you would never buy anything or do anything. You certainly would never take any medicine, because nothing is scarier than the fine print there. I wonder what the fine print on a Tesla self-driving purchase looks like...
- nerdponx 5y agoI come from a family of lawyers, and I do usually at least skim the fine print. But it's pretty much all the same and there's nothing I can do about it unless I radically detach myself from society in a way that I would prefer not to do. Binding arbitration clauses and extremely vague/weaselly privacy policies are the most common. Refund policies that are dependent on information that is not available to you until after you make the purchase (such as the type of your plane ticket booked through an online agency). Et alia. It's absolutely hilarious in the "ha ha isn't the world horrible" sense that anyone in a position of power would base legal decisions on the premise that consumers "voluntarily" enter into such agreements. It is voluntary only in the sense that the alternative is cultural/social deprivation and self-imposed exile from society. Participants in society are expected to be willing to connect to the Internet, board an airplane, etc. As it stands, entering into such an agreement is almost certainly done under duress and coercion. Any argument that consumers should "vote with their dollar" is meaningless, because there are essentially no alternatives. To argue otherwise is to blatantly disregard the facts, to the point where it can only be done out of malice. Court justices are too intelligent and too well-educated for this to be considered a matter of ignorance. In my opinion, the fact that the legal stuff tends to be written in fine print is almost irrelevant. People don't ignore it because it's small. If people had a real choice, they would read it anyway. The problem fundamentally is that people do not have any real choice. People don't read such agreements because they feel powerless, not because they are lazy.
- ryandrake 5y agoSince you have above-average exposure to the law due to your family being lawyers, maybe you have insight into this question I've always wondered: Why aren't these Terms of Service and EULAs more routinely voided due to them being unconscionable and adhesive? These seem to tick all the boxes: One-sided, no meaningful choice, no meeting of the minds, significant differences in bargaining power between the parties, no ability to negotiate, take-it-or-leave-it terms. I've never seen a Terms of Service or EULA that could be negotiated. Isn't that a fundamental attribute of a "voluntary" contract?
- axiosgunnar 5y agoDo note though that „legal fine print“ is similar to „React-Node.js-Mongodb“ boilerplate. Meaning that it sometimes makes sense to not have to start off at zero. Also complaining about long contracts is like saying „I don't like this program because the source code is too long“. Depending on the program, this might be a little capricious. Do you want lawyers to be „code golfing“?
- nerdponx 5y agoNobody is arguing against reusable, well-tested chunks of legal text! The argument is that there are too many detailed requirements for typical consumers to reasonably agree to, and moreover they tend to be hidden away where users can't even find them anyway. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think Justice Stevens' objection that the text was too small actually misses the mark. What else are they going to do, have you mail an old-school SASE to an office, or go to some website? The problem is that consumers don't actually have alternatives to agreeing to terms like this, so the assertion that consumers enter into these agreements "voluntarily" is flawed, because it's not voluntary if there are no alternatives.
- RugnirViking 5y agoIf somebody handed me a program and asked me to prove that there wasn't a virus/security vulnerability hidden somewhere in the source code, yeah I might well say that "I don't like this program because the source code is too long“. Especially if I had to do that for a different program every time I wanted to buy or do pretty much anything at all
- nerdponx 5y agoI've been arguing that length is just a result of complexity, and at the real problem is complexity. But I suppose in an extreme case, you could obfuscate a simple program by making it really long.
- afiori 5y agoIf the contract is long but most of it are examples, explanations of terms, and references to where and how things are defined then length would not be a problem.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- irrational 5y ago> Though David Foster Wallace’s famous journalistic argument against cruising had dampened my interest Uh, did anyone else click this link? If you did, you find find a pdf that is effectively impossible to read on a mobile device. This seems ironic in an article about being able to read the fine print.
- ryandrake 5y agoWe need to separate the concepts of "voluntarily purchasing a good or using a service" from "voluntarily agreeing to a document". Just because I voluntarily buy something doesn't mean I am necessarily voluntarily agreeing to its manufacturer's terms. It is a condition of buying the product, not something I am willfully agreeing to. Today, companies can enforce all sorts of crazy things on you just because some internal counsel wrote it in a Terms of Service document. And when you push back, everyone up through to Congress and the Supreme Court throws up their hands and says "Well, you voluntarily agreed to it." No I didn't! There was no meeting of the minds, no ability to negotiate, and the so-called agreement was not offered from an equal bargaining position: It was essentially take-it-or-leave-it policy written by a corporation. This needs to end. These things are not like contracts that equal parties sit down and shake hands and agree with each other on. I don't know what they are, but to lump them in with contracts and licenses seems totally wrong.
- redtexture 5y agoThe term for this process is contract of adhesion, in which one party has all of the power. An Overview of Adhesion Contracts and Clauses Trembly Law Firm https://tremblylaw.com/overview-adhesion-contracts-clauses/ https://tremblylaw.com/overview-adhesion-contracts-clauses/
- car_analogy 5y agoWorst of all, those terms tend to be the same across an industry, so if you don't agree to them, an entire class of products become unavailable to you. I bought an external disk that, on its packaging, stated that I agree to resolve any issues through arbitration. I could have returned it, but what are the chances other brands don't have the same clause? Unless citizens join together and restrict by law what such contracts may contain, we'll be forced to accept whatever our corporate masters decide.
- NoboruWataya 5y agoI think you're conflating two issues there. You are suggesting that there isn't a true agreement because one party either didn't read the contract or only begrudgingly agreed to be bound by its terms. Allowing either of those circumstances to void a contract would fundamentally undermine the whole concept. The whole point of contract is that it is a bargain; each side does something they would rather not do in order to gain something they wouldn't have otherwise. I don't want to pay rent; it's just something I have to do because otherwise I would have no place to live. I think the real issue here is contracts made between parties of unequal bargaining power. They are still contracts but perhaps they should be regulated more strictly. There are plenty of examples of EU consumer legislation taking this approach. Some impose obligations on the powerful party that can't be contracted out of; others imply terms into contracts; still others simply say that in certain contracts between unequal parties, unreasonable terms are unenforceable. Clearly there are many who think that this kind of regulation doesn't currently go far enough in protecting weaker parties, but I think it is the right conceptual framework.
- rcpt 5y agoJustice Stevens is the best. He wrote the sole Dissent on Nordlinger v Hahn (a case where we we had a chance to end the nightmare that is Californias Prop 13) referring to long-time California property owners as "Squires" in the process https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/90-1912.ZD.html https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/90-1912.ZD.html Clarence Thomas OTOH wrote the Concurrence and even refused to sign the Opinion because the court didn't go far enough and overturn a previous ruling from Pennsylvania which would have given property owners even more tax cuts. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/19/us/supreme-court-justices-affirm-law-california-restricting-property-tax-increases.html https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/19/us/supreme-court-justices...