When was the last time you signed a contract without reading it?
If you think you’ve never done that, have you ever read the terms and conditions which are in a little scrolly box before you’ve signed up for an eMail account? Do you know what Orkuts terms of service are? Or for that matter Facebook’s or Twitter’s are?
Whether or not one thinks of it, they are legally binding contracts. One recent example where such a contract was used against someone was in Megan Meier’s suicide case. Megan killed herself at the age of thirteen after being rejected online by a person she thought was a sixteen year old boy. That person, however, turned out to be Lori Drew, the mother of one of her friends.
Strangely enough, there were no laws which could readily be applied to prosecute the woman so she was ultimately charged with violating MySpace’s terms of use which, among other things, do not allow ‘promoting information users know to be false or misleading, or soliciting personal information from anyone under the age of 18 or using information gathered from the Web site to ‘harass, abuse or harm other people’.’
Presumably Ms Drew had no idea of what the terms of service were although in all probability, knowing them would not have stopped her from acting in the way she did.
The point, though, is not merely that she didn’t know what she signed up for but that the contract was treated as being binding on her and was given the ‘force of law’.
This is, by no stretch of the imagination, the only case in which a contract has been given such force. In the recent case of the overweight air hostesses the single judge bench of the Delhi High Court described the employment contract the air hostesses has signed as their nemesis. And in that case, it appears that the air hostesses did in fact know what they had signed.
Nonetheless, despite knowing what the pitfalls of signing agreements without knowing what their contents are or signing agreements without wanting to be bound by them, it’s something most people do without thinking twice.
Think of all the times people have signed loan agreements which say that they will repay money at 20% interest just because their money lender says, “But I’ll charge you only 14%, just let this be there on paper.”
The problem with just letting things be on paper is that if you sign them, they will bind you. It doesn’t matter if you have a separate oral agreement with different terms. It doesn’t matter if the other party claims that he won’t enforce the terms on paper.
The law of evidence very clearly says that oral evidence is excluded by the existence of documentary evidence. There are a few exceptions and provisos but they apply so rarely that it’s hardly worth taking them into consideration at all. For example, if you do not write your whole agreement down, while interpreting it and deciding whether or not you can give oral evidence about a supplementary oral agreement which you have not written down and which does not go against anything you have written down, the court will take into consideration ‘the degree of formality’ of the contract i.e. basically, who drafted it. And the contract will be interpreted differently depending on whether it was drafted by two laymen over coffee or by two dozen overpaid lawyers.
As a general rule, the only thing which a court will take into consideration is your written contract.
The moral of the story: sign what you mean, and mean what you sign.