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Comment by Invictus0 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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