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Comment by jkaplowitz | Hacker News Reader

In many countries, like Germany, surprising provisions in consumer terms of service are unenforceable for exactly this reason (and other reasons).

In my opinion, it's American over-adherence to legal formalism to the benefit of powerful companies and the detriment of consumers that is unreasonable, not the German approach. And I say this as an American myself.

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USA has very similar laws and legal tradition about what makes a contract valid.

The German (civil law) and US (common law) legal traditions are pretty disparate, including their approaches to contract law - but in this case the difference is due to consumer protection rules in Germany and Europe, not anything longstanding about either tradition.

I know very little about US law and even less about German law, but I think GP was referring to contracts of adhesion, which are less enforceable in the US too, afaik; even if the laws are far stronger in Germany and have different historical origins, maybe there's at least some spiritual similarity between the protections?

While it's true that contracts of adhesion are less enforceable in the US than other contracts, they're still very enforceable.

In particular, if there's some evidence that a consumer clicked a check box saying "I accept the terms of service" on a web form before submitting it, where a link to the full terms of service was offered and the check box was not checked by default, US courts will uphold far less friendly terms than German courts will.

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