I found one of those bullshit cards when I gutted a Tauntaun.
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And I thought they were litigious on the outside!
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We just need to print up postcards that say:
The card that you provided with my recent purchase describing an arbitration agreement is hereby considered null and void. If you disagree, you may come to collect your product and provide a full refund of the purchase price and applied taxes at any time within 15 days of receiving this postcard, providing I am at home.
Note: I’m not a lawyer! In order to stand a chance of impressing a judge, you’ll probably need to send it with a certified return receipt…
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I recently got “we are going to paint your house number on your curb for a fee. If you don’t want us to, then here is some work you have to do to stop us…”
I just got a similar thing with the Sunday paper.
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Oh, please. Here in the US, agreeing to binding arbitration is ordinarily a condition of employment.
call the city - assuming your town has an information line - and complain. that’s just someone trying to make a buck ( illegally ). even if you own your house, you don’t own the curb: the city does.
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interesting point
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In many jurisdictions the property owner is responsible for the maintenance of everything between the property line and the street — sidewalk, that strip of grass that I don’t know what it’s called, curb paint, even trees. Check with your City Hall.
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It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it were the city that was trying to make that buck.
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In my jurisdiction, everything past the property line is the city’s responsibility. If a tree in front of my house but not on my property is scraping my roof, it’s the city’s job to trim it. But if it snows, it’s my responsibility to clear the sidewalk (within 2 hours) or risk being ticketed; if someone slips on the ice in front of my house, I’m legally responsible.
The proper thing to do is to return it to the store, which will likely bitch to their vendor or supplier. This applies actual hurt to the goons who thought the legal bafflegab was a neat idea.
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Attorneys generally have a fiduciary and ethical duty to further their clients interests if the method is legal. The idea is roughly that in an adverarial system two advocates with contrary aims will ultimately lead courts to path to the ideal outcome (when the underlying law at issue is unjust this is a less helpful regime).
These hidden arb clauses are a toss up, with some courts enforcing them and others finding them invalid. If you’re an attorney working for Snuggie you likely have a duty to tell Snuggie mgmt that they have an option to include this, it’s up to the client whether to do so.
I’d note that these things all over the place especially in e commerce. Ever bought an item off Amazon? Their terms and conditions mandate arbitration ( at least one appellate ourt has found them non binding, yay).
I’m not pro arb btw, I’ve done consumer protection work on the plaintiffs’ side. These things are pretty abhorrent but the federal law on arb clauses only gives courts so much wiggle room to invalidate these things. Fittingly enough that law was passed well before the practice of concraled arb agreements really came to the fore. Don’t expect the Trump years to lead to much change here.
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These sort of things are the Serious Business version of the circle game where you trick someone into looking at you making the “OK” symbol (has to be below the waist) and then you get to punch them. Hey, if you didn’t want a bruised shoulder you should have opted out within 14 days of meeting me for the first time.
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This sort of thing makes my blood boil.
http://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2102&context=faculty_scholarship
It has seemed to some of us that the function of the modem doctrine of unconscionability during the early period of its case law development was twofold. First, when courts felt that existing rules of law were enabling merchants to impose on their customers contracts that were grossly unbalanced and inequitable–either because the effects of those contracts were not initially apparent or because the merchants’ raw economic power enabled them to do so-the courts could refuse to enforce those contracts on the ground of unconscionability. This is, of course, the “safety valve” referred to in the quotation above. Second, by producing and publishing opinions in which various problematic contracts and clauses were examined and condemned vocally and prominently, courts and individual judges could call to the attention of other actors in the legal system the existence of legal lacunae-gaps in existing law that failed to protect consumers against such overreaching. They could, in other words, “blow the whistle.” Of course the individuals affected may have benefitted from particular applications of the doctrine, but as commentators have pointed out, the use of individual lawsuits to develop a generally consumer-protective common law is by itself an inefficient and probably ultimately ineffective strategy. However, seen as a means of engaging other parts of the legal system and alerting them to problems in need of attention, the doctrine of unconscionability seems actually to have done in the 1960s and 1970s precisely what its proponents might have hoped: it helped to produce, at least for awhile, a legal climate in which the legislative, executive, and judicial branches with a more or less common voice sought to dispense a better brand of justice to consumers-not just to consumers of goods and services, but to consumers of the legal system itself. …
contract law as a judicially created component of our legal system might
be doomed to obsolescence by the mushrooming employment of arbitration clauses in adhesive contracts of all sorts. …
once again the ability of relatively powerless individuals to have unfettered access to their governmental institutions is being threatened by powerful interests who seek to deny that access, and who are supported by some of the very institutions by which those rights should be protected. But this time, instead of leading the fight to establish and protect individual rights, the Supreme Court has enlisted on the other side-on behalf of the credit card issuers and bank lenders, communications giants, powerful employers, and other drafters and enforcers of adhesion contracts, collectively the forces of what in this context one might fairly call “oppression and unfair surprise.”
This “whistle blowing” function that Knapp talks about is, by this point, just completely broken in our republic. Congress isn’t listening.
I think just wearing my T-Shirt version should be sufficient notice to the manufacturer.
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I hope they got your, “we are going to charge you $100 for painting house number on my curb. If you don’t want me to, then here is some work you have to do to stop us…” notice…
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Surely one of the most basic principles of contract law everywhere is that you cannot be bound by a clause that cannot be read until after the contract is in force.
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That’s absurd. I don’t doubt that what you say is true (I’m not from the US so I’ll take your word for it) but it is still absurd.
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Seems kinda like the opt-out procedure for Secret Rune.
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