All caps is harder for people to read. Unnecessary legal jargon makes it harder to understand. I would assume that this is a defensive measure to ensure that the person signing the document doesn't have an chance to completely read and comprehend the document, as their mind goes into a sort of 'flight or fight' response, whereby, they either give up, and sign the document, or refuse to sign what they don't agree with.
As many people aren't willing to admit that they don't understand something, they just go ahead and sign away their rights.
I've recently discovered, that when I bought my house, and went through the many, many pages of forms (I think it took me over 2 hrs), I missed one number, which wouldn't seem to significant (the appraised value of the house), but because they got the number wrong, I've been paying PMI for the last 5 years. To this day, I have no idea if that was intentionally done, as they tried to sneak something past me, and run up the profit made on the loan, or if it was a simple mistake. But well, I signed it, so I had to pay it.
ps -- I've only ever had one class on contracts, about 10 years ago. I'm not a lawyer, but I was raised by one, so I've learned the art of convenient rationalization.
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I've heard that there was actually a case where it was ruled that a vendor had deliberately buried a legal disclaimer in the "fine print" to keep the buyer from being aware of it. Therefore the buyer hadn't really agreed to it and wasn't bound by those provisions. Because of that precedent, certain things have been put in capital letters so that people can't argue that the disclaimers were deliberately buried.
I don't know if that is true, but if it were, it would be on par with what I've come to expect from the legal system. | [reply] |
Yes. TWICE AS BINDING as lower case clauses. :D
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My vote is that many attorneys are lazy, many are plagiarists, and many don't want to rewrite decent (for various odd values of the word) existing contract language. Don't ask me how those sets overlap.
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Yes, caps are sort of more binding. The Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), a set of laws about contracts and commerce that has been adopted by all the states in order to normalize comemrcial law in the US, requires that certain parts of a contract be "conspicuous," because they go contrary to the legal "default settings."
For example, competently written contracts will usually have all caps or large font for the disclaimer of the two implied warranties (merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose), because wherever the UCC is the law of the land, a seller implicitly warrants those two qualities in what he sells. He must conspicuously disclaim them in the contract.
This is why, e.g., in the brief form of the GPL included with programs it reads:
"This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details."
Specifically, the two implied warranties are disclaimed in caps. See http://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-316.html for more | [reply] |