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meddlepal

You're using the legal system... by negotiating away your right to sue.

Don't sign the agreement if you don't like it.

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There are some rights it should not be possible to negotiate away.

For example, a contract in which I forfeit my right to life or ownership of my own body would be considered invalid.

The same should be true of a contract in which I forfeit my right to sue. Half the point of the courts is to serve as a final arbiter when a contract is insufficient.

I tend to agree, but where does a 'do not resuscitate' order or a power of attorney fit into that?

A DNR doesn't sign away your right to life, it just asks others not to take positive action to save you. A more analogous situation would be assisted suicide, which is pretty controversial. Even then, assisted suicide is seen as a benefit to the person who's going to die, and the person who assists gets paid for it. I believe a contract which says you get to kill me in exchange for paying me (either in advance or to my heirs, presumably) would be uncontroversially invalid.

I'm not sure I see the relation to powers of attorney. Are you saying that granting PoA to another person is similar to granting enforcement rights to an arbitrator?

No, I was just referring to how someone can be granted a durable power of attorney, in which case they have license to remove the grantor from life support. Anyway, I support everything you said, and just to be clear, I'm no fan of arbitration; I was mostly playing devil's advocate.

I think you did a decent job playing devil's advocate, because now that you explained it a bit more, I'm not quite sure how PoAs fit into this. Maybe it's different because it's not done in exchange for something?

A durable power of attorney doesn't sign away your right to life. It gives someone revocable control of your life. You can withdraw that control at any time (assuming that you have the mental competence to be able to make legal decisions). There is no way to sign away your right to life, you can always take back any rights that you give someone.

That's fine until its inculcated into every commercial agreement going forward, and you have no legal power to challenge the entire system.

The answer seems pretty obvious... live a simpler life that doesn't depend on these services.

That's entirely workable... if you want to not have a job, or a bank account, or a credit card.

Exiling yourself from society shouldn't be a requirement of wanting equal access to the justice system.

There is zero reason not to include such a contract in every point of contact between you and society if you let people run with this one eventually the bottom of your receipt for a pound of grapes will contain such language and they'll call it a contract of adhesion.

If mandatory binding arbitration included as part of your standard interaction with businesses is a net negative for 99% of people and a positive for business owners and large stock holders there is no particular reason why the 99% can't vote not to allow the owners to do that.

A few months ago my car got covered in white paint from the garage of the apartment I live in. I had it detailed, which they agreed to pay for right away. They credited my account for the cost of the detail, then added it back as a rent charge when I refused to sign away my right to sue over the incident (well, the contract said basically they weren’t liable for anything that happened at all around that time on the premises. also the detailing didn’t remove the paint). They required me to pay back the money in order to make my rent payment the next month, or i would have been charged 10% of the rent + detailing charge as a fee. So yeah, avoid services like renting an apartment and you’ll be all set. Good luck!

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