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Comment by tty74 | Hacker News Reader

Yep, that’s how it works in Germany. There are laws that cover many cases for, i.e., lease contracts, online shopping, digital services. The terms of service just cover the specifics and cannot contain “surprising” or “unusual” things. The general idea is that a normal consumer neither have the knowledge nor the time to understand in depth legalese.

As one example, which is a quite similar case, the standard lease contract for apartments in Germany is 4 pages. In the USA I’ve had between 21 and 27 pages so far.

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In the US: they are long, but in my experience they're also extremely usual. Every apartment I've rented (5 in my city) has used the exact same template; with some blank lines and checkboxes where they write in "You'll pay this much in rent" "for this long" "pets are allowed" "garage: n/a" "satellite dish: n/a" etc.

The point being: there are no consequences for a landlord slipping one extreme condition into that template. Maybe on page 17.

And, as long as it doesn't breach any explicit laws, that condition is equally enforceable.

The German system above appears to specifically address that issue with US law.

> And, as long as it doesn't breach any explicit laws, that condition is equally enforceable.

That isn't true; if the court concludes that no reasonable person would ever have knowingly agreed, it will find that the condition is unenforceable. It's a real standard, but I don't recall the relevant technical terms.

Obviously it's hard to meet that standard, but breaching an explicit law is very much not a requirement for unenforceability.

edit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_v._Walker-Thomas_Furn....

> when a party of little bargaining power, and hence little real choice, signs a commercially unreasonable contract with little or no knowledge of its terms, it is hardly likely that his consent, or even an objective manifestation of his consent, was ever given to all the terms.

> In such a case the usual rule that the terms of the agreement are not to be questioned should be abandoned and the court should consider whether the terms of the contract are so unfair that enforcement should be withheld.

Absolutely, but there are a few points that render this ineffective as a market mechanism in our current reality.

Point 1: You're probably yourselves vs a professional management company / large property owner. They obviously bring more resources and experience to a legal case than you do, in addition to simply having more time to engage in one.

Point 2: That's assuming you can even take the case to court, and didn't sign away any disputes into arbitration.

> Point 2:

I don't think that matters at all; if you have a term in your contract that a court will find unconscionable, an arbitrator is... shall we say, extremely likely to find the same thing.

You're also free to haul the arbitrator into court if they make an egregious ruling. The fact that you were subject to binding arbitration and the arbitrator awarded your firstborn son to the company isn't going to be any more convincing to a judge than the alternative fact that your contract clearly states you're giving up your firstborn son to the company.

> You're probably yourselves vs a professional management company / large property owner.

That actually works against them in court, especially in the particular scenario being discussed.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adhesion_contract#

Anyone who says what "US law" is, regarding property rental contracts, is either generalizing or doesn't know what they're talking about. Landlord/tenant law is one thing that varies quite a bit from state to state and it is mostly out of scope of federal law.

And furthermore, it's a common misconception that something is 'legal' to stipulate just because they've seen it in their contracts before. People put unenforceable crap in contracts all the time because 9/10 people will just believe it's enforceable and go along with it.

I am an American, I went to American public high school, and not one in a particularly rich town. (So there, people who think American schools are all junk.) I did, however, get a class in basic business law, including contracts, which I think should be mandatory for all high school students, and it would cover precisely this kind of thing.

> I think should be mandatory for all high school students

Notice how anything related to wealth management (contracts, financial concepts and practices, etc) is rarely (if ever) included in compulsory schooling.

This is by design.

36 states require a civics course, which typically include personal finance topics. It was covered when I was in school decades ago.

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/data-most-states-re...

Yes: People think school should be more about learning the "traditional" subjects and get angry when schools deviate.

No, that's because the ruling classes can integrate that knowledge in their own way later on, whereas others cannot. This coupled very well with the original aristocratic pretension that "material" subjects should be considered inferior.

So we ended up with Western education systems that produce intellectuals who conceptually despise wealth management, ensuring education remains thoroughly detached from the actual levers of power. That suits rulers just fine.

You have a nice little castle of theory built on air.

The extreme condition you are talking about often will be unenforceable. It doesn't stop people from trying, though.

Generally, contracts on the US where there is one party who writes them and another party who doesn't get to edit them (leases, employment contracts, etc.) have a lot of case law about what can and can't be enforced on the party who doesn't have authorship control. Contacts where both parties are writing them have a lot more freedom to screw a participant, but also generally savvier participants.

Fair; but my point is more-so, if there was a Page 27 at the end that inserted some unusual terms, it'd be really obvious because it wouldn't look like all the templated stuff before it, and anyone reasonable would catch it. Its also a lot less tiring to read through those preceding 26 pages because its all templated, and you're really just reading the custom notes and checkboxes and such.

I don't feel its unreasonable to read through a dozen or two pages of contracts for something like a rental lease that will eat up 30% of your income for the next year; and I've never felt that my city/state is in dire need of improving the situation. The problem with online service terms is more-so that: they aren't standardized, they all say different things, they oftentimes claim things that aren't legally enforceable, they're usually a UI afterthought... they're just bad. We do need some kind of legislation for those. I don't feel that requiring a summary is the answer.

My brother got zinged with this. "You must repaint the house after moving out." He wasn't even there for a year.

He's a good, law abiding fellow, so he did it. It was the last thing he needed to deal with on top of all the stress of moving. I would have just ignored it, let them take me to court if they want.

I would have painted everything purple. Including the roof, ceilings, door knobs, everything.

Does the contract stipulate to the satisfaction of the other party? Seems like it's terribly arbitrary if there aren't really specific terms about what paint to use, what color to use, they quality of the surface, etc.

I don't pity anyone that can't be bothered to read their lease before signing. If we can't read 30 page contracts as a society then the contracts are not the problem, we are.

100% of people need housing but well <100% of people can read and fully understand a legal document. Contracts don't bind society, they bind individual people.

And it's not just about being able to read and understand. It's power dynamics. How often are you in a position to negotiate the boilerplate contract that gets put in front of you when you're doing most normal stuff. It's "sign here and here and here, etc", not "read this over and come back with your edits". I negotiate contracts as part of my job, and we go back and forth and make sure parties agreed and understand. As someone else pointed out, such contracts almost certainly should be enforceable, even with unusual terms, because they were expressly co-written and agreed to. An uneditable document drafted by and in favor of one party is not the same thing at all, regardless of the signer's capacity to understand

Yes, this is important, and the law generally considers this, and it will treat B2B contracts differently than B2C contracts which are more frequently one-sided. B2B contracts often have more leeway to be enforceable as-written, but B2C contracts often have explicit limitations in the form of "consumer protection laws" or "tenants rights", etc.

I’m afraid I disagree… 30 pages for mortgage, and then all the terms of service for the software services that you use, plus the credit cards, websites visited and so on… this becomes a full time job for a legally illiterate person and is the definition of “setup to fail”… hence the term “fine print”

I'm as much a fan of caveat emptor as any libertarian, but that doesn't mean we can't make it easier.

Parsing 20+ pages of legalese, when it could be shipped as a diff instead, is simply inefficient.

A lot of website privacy policies are just people filling out privacy policy generator sites. They might as well just directly show the boxes checked and fields filled out, instead of the output document.

> Every apartment I've rented (5 in my city) has used the exact same template.

Given the number of different templates floating around tailored to most individual states, that’s either an extreme coincidence, or there is shared ownership, management, or legal representation between the different apartment complexes.

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