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The fact that a company is able to get away with stealing homes from elderly people who have dementia without these contracts being quickly voided as obviously fraudulent is all the evidence you need that the legal system is currently badly broken. These are not hard cases for a judge or a juror to consider.
Indeed, they entered into the contract of their own volition.
What do you call volition without symmetrical information? What happens when other people's livelihoods rely on your volition? Should vulnerable people deserve additional protections?
Your comment suggests that _anyone_ has volition enough to decide whether to sign these contracts or not, and I don't see how that's the case here.
So no matter what, if you signed on the dotted line, you’re liable case closed.
If you mean there's some maximum acceptable threshold of asymmetrical information then the obvious rejoinder is who gets to decide what that threshold is?
(And, philosophically, how is that decided when any possible deciders, or combination of deciders, are themselves asymmetrically informed?)
But even setting that aside, I'm sure you're also absolutely fine with every "Terms and Conditions" you sign up to every time you create a free account online. So if as parodied in the South Park episode, Apple shows up to your house and insists you join their Human Centipad because it was right there in the terms and conditions you signed up to when buying an iPhone, you will happily have your mouth sown to someone else's backside because you agreed to a contract.
For seniors with dwindling mental capacity the situation is even more dire.
As I remember it, there was a famous case decades ago where a bank manager visited the home of an elderly Polish couple. The couple had a mortgage with the bank, and the bank wanted to renegotiate the terms of their mortgage. Only the wife was home, and she barely spoke any English. She understood that the man in the suit from the bank wanted them to sign some paperwork, so she did. As a co-signatory of the mortgage, her signature was enough.
The couple eventually lost their home as a result, and the case went through the courts. Eventually the high court (equivalent of the supreme court in the USA) sided with the couple. They said that because the bank has more money and skill, they have more power in a negotiation like this. As a result, they bear proportionately more responsibility during contract negotiations. In this case, it was their responsibility as the powerful party to make sure the borrowers actually understood the terms they were signing.
We basically only have 6 banks in Australia because of things like this. Its very difficult and expensive to open a new bank in australia because of regulatory requirements. But my impression is that the banks here are extremely careful when it comes to interacting with unsophisticated investors. They (reasonably) assume the courts will rule against them if they do anything that doesn't pass the pub test.
(I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc.)
It's not as cut and dry as you would like it to be. The following is literally about a "contract signed by the infirm":
>After David learned of the contract, he explained to Evans that his mother had dementia and tried to cancel the sale. Instead of walking away, Evans dug in, recording a notice on the property’s title that essentially prevented a sale to anyone else, which forced the Casanova family into a years-long battle to keep the home. Along the way, Evans disputed that Casanova showed signs of impairment during their interactions.
In general, it seems like a huge problem that people who probably are not capable of signing contracts can in fact sign them and have no real recourse for dealing with it. Seems like a good spot for a safety net.
The lesson here is to marry someone much younger so you have someone to take care of you in your twilight years. Also good to have lots of kids and raise them right. Statistically at least one of them will be able to take care of you.
The buyer has the signature on paper and can proceed with taking the house.
The person who just sold their house _could_ contest it in court... except that they're not mentally competent so by definition they won't be able to mount a defense (i.e., realize that they just got scammed, hire a lawyer, put together a strategy, etc, etc). Brilliant!
If the elderly, mentally incompetent person has _someone_else_ in their life who notices this early and jumps in to clock a lot of hours to stop this from happening, then sure - everything will be fine.
If not, well, the bad guys win.
Idk if it warrants a story beyond “existing laws not being upheld in some cases”, meaning I don’t know how much these cases apply to the whole market or most courts, but it looks like there are a fair number of seriously messed up contract scams getting through in this industry.
Yes, that's why the houses are considered stolen.
The law has a concept for that: deed or title theft. "Stealing" is the appropriate colloquial descriptor.
It's literally stealing.
Making an unfair offer to someone, after lying and/or gaslighting them when they're desperate or vulnerable, and THEN working incredibly hard to prevent them from undoing or recovering from a mistake. Might not meet your strict definition of stealing (still possibly fraud which would count as theft), it's clearly deep into the ethics of stealing.
Which is the authors point.
The thesis isn't a legal one "these people have committed the crime of theft". It's an ethical one, what these people are doing is equivalent to stealing; and a just society would prevent them from getting away with this asshattery.
And it's specifically designed to look "fair" and hence more palatable to the overly credulous.
Shoplifting: not stealing.