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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

The article seems to be missing an important piece of evidence

> He said: "I am satisfied on the balance of probabilities that Chris okayed or approved the contract just like he had done before except this time he used a thumbs-up emoji."

It does seem that the farmer has agreed to previous contracts in a "similar fashion" which is, apparently, what the judge based his decision on. It's easy to make commentaries here about how crazy this is when we do not have the full facts of the story.

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We do have the full facts, this article just doesn't link to the actual ruling, which is a personal pet peeve of mine.

https://www.livelaw.in/pdf_upload/2023skkb116-480130.pdf

"just like he had done before except this time he used a thumbs-up emoji"

Surely the "_except_ this time he used a thumbs-up emoji" means he did _not_ use the thumbs up to mean acceptance before?

He used words like "yup" and "looks good" in the past to accept the contracts - the judge ruled that a thumbs up emoji is effectively the same as saying "yup" which as demonstrated was enough for him to accept contracts in the past. To make a difference between "yup" and an emoji at this point is to engage in a linguistic discussion that avoids the core of the issue - if your contractor was previously accepting contracts by saying "yup", is a thumbs up emoji just as good? The judge seems to think so.

If he previously said “okay” but said “ok” this time… Or sent the OK emoji… Or previously said “yes” but this time said “yup” or sent a Yes emoji…

In all those cases (and this case), I’d conclude exactly as the court did. I don’t think this was some kind of trickery being attempted by the plaintiff, but rather they made a completely reasonable conclusion that they had an accepted contract.

Yeah, this was clearly a farmer trying to back out of a contract after prices had skyrocketed and he could do better than deliver on his existing deal. There was clearly a meeting of the minds here, and that is all that is required for a contractual obligation to be enforceable.

That would be like saying he used "yup" to sign contracts in the past except this time he used "yeah" (if you accept that yup, yeah, and thumbs up emoji are all linguistically equivalent).

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