Contracts Of Adhesion Research Articles

Federal Jurisdiction. Service of Process upon Person Designated Defendant's Agent in Contract of Adhesion Does Not Give in Personam Jurisdiction over Defendant Actually Receiving Notice When No True Agency Relationship Exists

Federal Jurisdiction. Service of Process upon Person Designated Defendant's Agent in Contract of Adhesion Does Not Give in Personam Jurisdiction over Defendant Actually Receiving Notice When No True Agency Relationship Exists

The Form 50 Lease: Judicial Treatment of an Adhesion Contract

The Form 50 Lease: Judicial Treatment of an Adhesion Contract

Determining the Scope of Choice of Law Provisions in Steamship Tickets: Adhesion Contracts and the Conflict of Laws

Determining the Scope of Choice of Law Provisions in Steamship Tickets: Adhesion Contracts and the Conflict of Laws

Adhesion Contracts in the Conflict of Laws

Americana Olvera, a circus artist, was seriously injured in a fall from the trapeze. She recovered judgment against her employers, who had claimed unsuccessfully that she had signed a contract releasing them from any liabilities growing out of any injury or accident to the person, that the contract by its terms was a Florida contract, and that Florida law gave effect to such agreements regarding injuries caused by ordinary negligence. The appellate court, stating that it was competent for the parties, even if the law of the forum was different, to agree upon and fix the law controlling all the liabilities, found Florida law applicable and reversed the judgment.' Her chosen law would thus have left Miss Olvera without redress-had this been the end of the case. On retrial, however, the jury were instructed that to help plaintiff under the law of Florida they would have to find defendant guilty of gross negligence, and so the jury found. The appellate court now saw nothing wrong with the judgment.2 Delmar Duskin, a pilot of Pennsylvania-Central Airlines, was killed in a crash in Alabama. Claiming that this crash had been caused by the company's negligence his widow brought suit in the federal courts of Tennessee, the state of his domicile. The district court3 granted defendant's motion to dismiss on the ground that the employment contract provided for application of the law of Pennsylvania, whose workmen's compensation act excluded common law actions. The circuit court4 fully approved this recognition of party autonomy. Had this been the end of the court's reasoning Mrs. Duskin would have been left to the mercy of a form contract which her husband may not even have read.5 But the court found that under the conflicts law of Pennsylvania this case was governed by the law of Alabama, which permitted plaintiff's common law action. Francisco Chinchilla, who had suffered an injury while employed as a

Contracts of Adhesion--Some Thoughts about Freedom of Contract

WAith the development of a free enterprise system based on an unheard of division of labor, capitalistic society needed a highly elastic legal institution to safeguard the exchange of goods and services on the market. Common law lawyers, responding to this social need, transformed from the clumsy institution that it was in the sixteenth century into a tool of almost unlimited usefulness and pliability. Contract thus became the indispensable instrument of the enterpriser, enabling him to go about his affairs in a rational way. Rational behavior within the context of our culture is only possible if agreements will be respected. It requires that reasonable expectations created by promises receive the protection of the law or else we will suffer the fate of Montesquieu's Troglodytes, who perished because they did not fulfill their promises. This idea permeates our whole law of contracts, the doctrines dealing with their formation, performance, impossibility and damages. Under a free enterprise system rationality of the law of contracts has still another aspect.1 To keep pace with the constant widening of the market the legal system has to place at the disposal of the members of the community an ever increasing number of typical business transactions and regulate their consequences. But the law cannot possibly anticipate the content of an infinite number of atypical transactions into which members of the community may need to enter. Society, therefore, has to give the parties freedom of contract; to accommodate the business community the ceremony necessary to vouch for the deliberate nature of a transaction has to be reduced to the absolute minimum. Furthermore, the rules of the common law of contract have to remain Jus dispositivum-to use the phrase of the Romans; that is, their application has to depend on the intention of the parties or on their neglect to rule otherwise. (If parties to a contract have failed to regulate its consequences in their own way, they will be supposed to have intended the consequences envisaged by the common law.) Beyond that the law cannot go. It has to delegate legislation to the contracting parties. As far as they are concerned, the law of contract has to be of their own making.