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Comment by anonbanker | Hacker News Reader

Then agree under duress. You have 72 hours to modify any contract you enter (which becomes 10 days by snail mail), so agree quickly with your adversary, so as to get out of his way. Once you have access to your account, immediately begin arbitration whilst looking for another safe place.

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That only applies to certain types of contracts and/or in certain states. Please don't dispense legal advice when you're not qualified, you're not certain, or your advice is about specific facts and could be misconstrued as more general. You could lead people into making expensive mistakes.

The onus on you is to provide evidence that I am unqualified to provide legal advice now. You didn't disprove anything I said, merely asterisk'ed it, as if that somehow made it irrelevant.

I'm curious as to what types of contracts it doesn't apply to, and what states it doesn't apply in. As you mentioned they exist, perhaps you can let me know which contracts and which states you were talking about?

don't know what you're smoking, but this is not the law in California -- which is what Slack chose (unilaterally) as the governing law of this document.

I believe that's a federal rule governed by the FTC, not the state.

the FTC does not have plenary power over all contracts. There are certain "cooling off" periods for specific purchases (cell phone service and automobiles come to mind) but as a general rule? No way. And really really no way in this context.

  > don't know what you're smoking,

Silver Skunk, actually. :)

As to the law in California, which Slack chose, I'll just take from page 12 of Contracts: Examples And Explanations (Fourth Edition), a book I got in first-year:

"It would be remiss not to at least draw to your attention that courts do not mechanically apply rules of law. Judges and juries are sensitive to the equities of individual cases and the circumstance of the parties, and where a mechanical application of rules achieves a result that seems to be unjust, there is likely to be some adjustment or even manipulation of the rule to avoid it."

So, with the above in mind, let's say that, while they really want the governing law to be based in California, if one party decides to keep this contract squarely governed within Article 33 of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law's Arbitration Rules (after all, isn't California law in harmony with international law?), then the court would necessarily understand why filing in California, or even only recognizing the limited rights that exist in California law, might not be prudent in all circumstances.

The funniest part about the downvotes, is that a bunch of people uneducated in law decided to make a judgement based on something they are in fact ignorant of. They merely liked the replies better.

I wish I could send this thread to dang, as an example of the hivemind that HN metamoderation needs to address.

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