A modest proposal to fix contracts

Rescuing contracts from sprawling garbage legalese novellas masquerading as “agreements.”

Cory Doctorow

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A pair of shaking hands; one of them is demonic red, with sharp black talons. The demonic hands’ cuff buttons are the glowing red eyes of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Behind the two hands is a contract with a pen scrawling a signature. Image: EFF (modified) https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg CC BY 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read

Every time I click through one of those garbage legalese novellas you’re expected to say “I Agree” to before doing something totally normal and inconsequential, I’m reminded of the legendary Lenny Bruce bit “Eat, Sleep and Crap.”

http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=24181

In this bit, all civilization begins with agreements:

“Let’s see. I tell you what we’ll do. We’ll have a vote. We’ll sleep in Area A. Is that cool?”

“OK, good.”

“We’ll eat in Area B. Good?”

“Good.”

“We’ll throw a crap in area C. Good?”

This social contract is the foundation of civilization. It’s why you don’t die from fecal-oral bacterial transmission.

Naturally, the legal profession has put a little more detail into the idea of what constitutes a contract in the years since. As Stanford Law’s Mark Lemley writes in “The Benefit of the Bargain,” “A canonical contract is a written agreement negotiated between two sophisticated parties.”

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4184946

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow

Written by Cory Doctorow

Writer, blogger, activist. Blog: https://pluralistic.net; Mailing list: https://pluralistic.net/plura-list; Mastodon: @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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