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Comment by jamesk_au | Hacker News Reader

There's no need for such a law.[1] If you haven't read it, or if you don't understand it, don't sign it. Problem solved.

If you don't have the confidence to ask for time to consider or seek advice about a contract you've been asked to sign, that is a different problem.

[1] In some jurisdictions there is a statutory 'cooling off' period for particular classes of contract (eg five business days for the sale of residential property) during which the purchaser can decide not to proceed, but there is no such need in relation to commercial transactions generally.

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Have you read and understood the T&C for Hacker News? How about your ISP? The captive portal in your local coffee shop? Your computer's/phone's OS upgrades? Your car's ECM (it's probably buried in the user manual)?

We encounter too many of these on a daily basis, on things required simply to participate in modern life, to read/understand the vast majority of them.

The proposition that it is impractical to read and understand every contract we enter into does not present a need for a law invalidating or avoiding every contract where insufficient time to read and understand it is not given. I think the only consequence of the proposed law (if that proposition is correct) would be to destroy contractual certainty for a time; the premise denies that anyone would actually use the period of time for its intended purpose.

I also only referred to contracts that are signed. Signatures are important: as a general rule, you are taken to have read and understood the terms of any contract you have signed. If you agree to the terms of a contract without signing (eg many of the examples you mention, or oral acceptance, or clicking a button) there is generally no such assumption. Whether that will afford you any greater measure of relief if you later want to get out of the contract depends on the individual case, but there are circumstances in which it will.

In theory, the "cooling off" periods you mention should cover the "minimum time" requirements that I'm suggesting. The devil is in the details, of course, but such periods where the contract being negotiated can still be called off would account for my concerns.

As for the rest of contract law, this very thread exists because of the problem of people not actually reading contracts. We can't make people read them, and we can't make sure that people understand what a contract contains[1].

What we can do is show that one of the requirements for a contract[2] hasn't been met.

I'm totally fine with skipping this requirement if it is the 2nd or later time you've signed the contract. I would also say that a business that wrote the contract has obviously met the time requirement already. This types of details are flexible and open to negotiation.

I am simply suggesting that trowing a multi-page contract at someone and letting them sign it seconds later shouldn't count as a valid contract, and that we can now calculate a lower bound length of time. It would be nice if this encouraged shorter contracts in some situations or favoring common language over what most people consider obtuse legalease, but this is not required.

[1] but maybe we should

[2] the "meeting of the minds", or mutual agreement to the contents of the contract and requirements of each party

I understand the concern, and I agree that real problems arise - relatively often - when people don't take the time to read and understand contracts before they sign them. I don't have any data for the following assertion, but I would hazard a guess that the reason most people don't read contracts is not that they do not have the time to read them, but that they do not want to take the time to read them.

I think building in a cooling off period is not likely to incentivise people to take the time to read and understand their contracts. The experience of reading and trying to understand a contract is too unpleasant. Could the experience be made more pleasant? I don't know, but if you find a way to crack that nut, you might find a unicorn inside.

>people don't take the time to read and understand contracts before they sign them

Should an individual be bound by an agreement they did not understand when they entered into it? Take phone contracts. Every time I've spoken with a sales person, they outright lied to me about the contract. I'm one of the only individuals who sit down and read the contract realizing where they lied to me. But friend and parents are far more trusting and have been tricked numerous times.

Given the evidence that companies are exploiting both customer's trust and customers limited understanding (especially when you consider that many below average individuals are signing these contracts), I feel these contracts should be just as valid as a contract signed by a 7 year old.

> incentivise people to take the time to read

That, technically, is not what I'm proposing.

I suggest a burden on businesses or other parties that want to require a contract, in the form of a forced delay roughly proportional to the length/complexity of the contract they wish to use.

In practice, I expect businesses will find this unacceptable[1]. They would therefor work to find some alternative solution.

It might be that there wasn't a need for contracts in some situations, or that the contract language could be made much simpler/shorter. Alternatively, maybe a handful of "well known" standard contracts could become popular, similar in style to the Creative Commons licenses.

We cannot (and should not) avoid complex contracts entirely, but we might be able to fix a lot of common "simple" situations that shouldn't use a complex contract that few people read. By setting up the time burden, I expect complex contract (that might already have a "cooling off" period) wouldn't be significantly affected, but everyday small-time stuff will be incentivised to move away from the current practice of throwing usually-one-sided legalease at everything.

[1] I have often heard that the reason our current credit card system hasn't been updated to something with actual security (chip+pin, one time numbers, some sort of callback system, etc) is that any of these better methods would slow down transactions, resulting in less sales. Regardless of this being true or not, I'm attempting to utilize the perception.

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