Live data from Hacker News

Justice Stevens reads the fine print

matthewbutterick.com

111–120 of 230 posts

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#111
post #51

Fine print or not, most people (myself included) rarely if ever read the "fine print". If you did read the fine print, and you were of a problem-solving (pessimist) mentality, then you would never buy anything or do anything. You certainly would never take any medicine, because nothing is scarier than the fine print there. I wonder what the fine print on a Tesla self-driving purchase looks like...

I come from a family of lawyers, and I do usually at least skim the fine print. But it's pretty much all the same and there's nothing I can do about it unless I radically detach myself from society in a way that I would prefer not to do.

Binding arbitration clauses and extremely vague/weaselly privacy policies are the most common. Refund policies that are dependent on information that is not available to you until after you make the purchase (such as the type of your plane ticket booked through an online agency). Et alia.

It's absolutely hilarious in the "ha ha isn't the world horrible" sense that anyone in a position of power would base legal decisions on the premise that consumers "voluntarily" enter into such agreements. It is voluntary only in the sense that the alternative is cultural/social deprivation and self-imposed exile from society. Participants in society are expected to be willing to connect to the Internet, board an airplane, etc. As it stands, entering into such an agreement is almost certainly done under duress and coercion. Any argument that consumers should "vote with their dollar" is meaningless, because there are essentially no alternatives.

To argue otherwise is to blatantly disregard the facts, to the point where it can only be done out of malice. Court justices are too intelligent and too well-educated for this to be considered a matter of ignorance.

In my opinion, the fact that the legal stuff tends to be written in fine print is almost irrelevant. People don't ignore it because it's small. If people had a real choice, they would read it anyway. The problem fundamentally is that people do not have any real choice. People don't read such agreements because they feel powerless, not because they are lazy.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#112
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a stupid answer. Maybe too extreme, but I believe it contains some elements of truth. Trust has been largely eroded by greed, corruption and incompetence, and if one counts only on trust is probably going to get the short end of the stick. As a matter of fact, when you "outsource" some activity, you need some non-zero amount of competence in the outsourced field to be able to evaluate the level of…

I think it's impolite to label the original answer stupid, he seems to have taken time to at least think about it, and we should keep a civil tone here. However, I agree with the guy who called it stupid. Not in calling it stupid, but in that it's an answer that creates more questions than it answers. You could nuance it and take the steelman version, which is that everyone should be generally educated and know a bit…

I don't think there's anything uncivil about calling something as stupid as "if you don't want to be a victim of the very legal foundation of the country you live in, you must:

a) be smart enough to get into a very competitive professional school (most people don't have a college degree, which is required, and even objectively bad law schools are somewhat hard to get into),

b) be wealthy enough to pay for it (it costs on average $150k plus opportunity costs),

c) be interested enough in it to actually consider it, and

d) be... stupid enough to actually do it (there are too many lawyers, and less than 1/4 of them say their education was worth it)"

stupid.

> The only realistic answer is to known a tiny bit about a bunch of things, and a lot about one "thing" and then rely on social institutions to make sure you get what you're due when interacting with experts in other fields.

And this is exactly why "just go to law school" is a stupid answer in this context.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#113
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer according to my family: Get a law degree. I'm the only one who doesn't have one / hasn't passed a bar exam. If you don't want to be victim of that system, treat being a lawyer as a form of hacking. It's no different than being a victim of dark pattern software practices, which you would be if you didn't know how to code. (Ironically, part of my slot involves helping lawyers get around pitfalls in software)…

>"The answer according to my family: Get a law degree" Form your own country and become a president.

As useful a suggestion, but at least this one was funny.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#114

Being from a family of lawyers, I was always told that fine print on documents you didn't sign or initial essentially has no weight in court. I'm not a lawyer and I've never tested this hypothesis personally, but I tend to disregard it as something that wouldn't hold up if I had a valid claim.

I remember reading that in Germany, an EULA is unenforceable unless you have the opportunity to read it before purchasing the product. I imagine this was much more of an issue back in the days when software came on CDs in boxes at stores, and not as downloads.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#115

Someone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex. It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that type of stuff. It's basically impossible to read the docs for all the services you buy, and even if you did you wouldn't know what it meant in terms of law. Yet we have lawyers talking through the technical minutiae as if they are source code. There's a huge d…

Not sure if this works well enough, but tools like https://legalmind.tech/summarizer/ could play a valuable role here and cause legalese to simplify along the way too.

Edit: another one https://pribot.org/polisis

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#116
post #83

Unfortunately the Supreme court has become more and more pro-corporations, which means that buying a car or getting a job is a lengthy one-sided legal contract likely waiving your right to trial by an elected judge, trial by jury, choice of forum/law, and arbitration costs that are significantly higher than if you were to go through a regular court. Of course the company has already picked the venue and arbitration c…

I'd be curious if there's a way to characterize "the prototypic expected human" as implicitly reflected in SCOTUS decisions and how that changes over time. For example, this decision implies people are expected to read the volumes of fine print on a ticket before they purchase it. Seems like if you decontextualized things it might point to absurdities in current law or its interpretation. I think many decisions are a…

That's a great idea. I would probably take countless hours of poring over legal documents. Maybe NLP tools could help identify relevant sections of text for this purpose.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also know how disgusting kitchens are [...] They're disinfected literally every day, and during the day all surfaces are regularly cleaned. If this isn't mandatory where you live, you live in a country with bad hygiene laws. > We pay back of house staff as little as we can get away with to work every weekend and holiday in hellish conditions. This doesn't match where I live at all, FWIW.

> If this isn't mandatory where you live, you live in a country with bad hygiene laws. Are drugs illegal in your country? Do people still do them?

If you spend a little time thinking about the amount of restaurants versus the amount of actual people there are in a country, you will realise one is relatively easy to enforce compared to the other.

Furthermore, the conversation was about the average. It is not the case that the average human being goes around snorting coke in the toilet every day, just as it is not the case that the average restaurant is some bastion of filth. Moving around the goalposts in such a way is not a way to have a conversation in good faith, so please stop doing so.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#118
post #82

Seeing the domain and the title I was wondering at first what the article had to do with typography. Mr. Buttericks guide on practical typography is an must read for everyone in print- and webdesign: https://practicaltypography.com/

OMG, that’s him! No wonder this site looks simply beautiful. Also, he wrote a book on typography for lawyers: https://typographyforlawyers.com/

It's funny, I showed this website to a lawyer and his response was "that's nice, but everyone uses Times New Roman in Word so that's what I have to use. My job is to write and edit, not to make things pretty. I don't see what the point is."

So here I am, a data scientist and software engineer, reading his book purely out of hobby interest, while actual attorneys have no use for it.

I suppose things are different when you are in private practice and presumably work on smaller deals with fewer numbers of people involved in editing the documents.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#119
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Courts don’t actually need to deal with vary many cases though. I suspect the average person needs to deal with the legal system for anything more complex than a speeding ticket less than once per decade. And as it turns out five minutes in front of a judge can easily handle: “The speed camera is showing a picture of a pickup truck, I drive an SUV.” It’s only a minute fraction of cases that take significant time to r…

So, looking at stats for England and Wales about 80% of homicide incidents result in one or more suspects being charged and a small number of those end up being acquitted (though it often takes some time for people to be charged). I guess that counts as significantly fewer, but wasn’t the impression I got from my initial reading of your post.

Yes; there are also a significant number of guilty pleas. They obviously vastly reduce trial time, though not the cost of investigation etc.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#120

Being from a family of lawyers, I was always told that fine print on documents you didn't sign or initial essentially has no weight in court. I'm not a lawyer and I've never tested this hypothesis personally, but I tend to disregard it as something that wouldn't hold up if I had a valid claim.

Good to be skeptical of that idea, courts consider many forms of consent contractual as long as they can be accepted as proof of consent. Periodically, a jurisdiction may explicitly specify that a certain form of consent is necessary, presumably to unbog their court system. Secondly, a lot of fine print benefits you. missed out on crazy compensation during a minor inconvenience just because you skipped locking in pro…

> a lot of fine print benefits you

I'd love it if you could give examples, preferably more than one. Because most people's view of "fine print" is that it is invariably out to screw you over as hard as possible.

Post reply on HN