 highhatsizeNorm, The Basset For All TimePremium
join:2001-02-08
Spring, TX
 ·Comcast
| The History of "The Contract" Formerly, a contract was deemed to be valid if both parties exchanged something of value. If you traded a gold coin for a Lima bean you were assumed to have exercised your "freedom to contract". The last Supremes to hold to this theory died in the Hoover Administration.
Latterly, the question of why anyone in their right mind would trade a gold coin for a Lima bean caused questions of "informed consent" and "relative bargaining power" to take over as determinative of validity.
Was one of the parties a loonie, dumb as paste, or ignorant as Tom Cruise? Was the other party a multi-national corporation with a multi-billion dollar legal budget? Hmmm? Such contracts are now considered suspect. Implicitly unfair are the contracts wherein the multi-national corporation presents an average individual with a long, abstrusely worded contract and says, "Sign", since there is no actual bargaining. These are called, "adhesion contracts". Adhesion contracts for products or services wherein all the vendors offer precisely the same terms are considered the legal equivalent of ticker-tape.
Inevitably, all adhesion contracts that contain unfair terms that fall within the above parameters are held to be void by the courts. However, the Court$$$ do not take cognizance of the unfairness until it is pressed home to them by professionals, (i.e. Lawyer$$$), who wait until the millions of victims of the multi-nationals have accumulated a big enough pot of damage$$$ so that is worth the lawyers while to $$ue. Voila! Class-action suits.
If the government protected citizens against predatory multi-national corporations, class-action suits would not exist. But the last legislators seriously interested in that died in the Carter administration.
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Cordially,
SANFRANSON |
