There is an advert on British Television at the moment featuring a rock star who signs an autograph for a fan and finds he has signed a contract of some kind (presumably marriage, as he ends up living in a trailer park with this hideous women and her brats). The point of the ad is that with this Mobile Phone company, you can get free minutes without signing a contract.
My question however is to do with the inadvertant signing of a contract - I was under the impression that one had to be aware (or be made aware) of the contents of the thing you were signing for it to be legally binding. Is this true?
IANAL, but, you do have to be aware. Both parties have to have an understanding of all the terms included in the contract, implied or not, to make the contract valid.
Also, you can’t enter into contract when you are intoxicated either.
Wycliff would be good to go home, unless he actually wants to stay with the pretty lady.
A contract to marry in the future is not enforceable.
A marriage is iteself enforceable, and you can think of it as a contract if you want to. But you cannot conclude a marriage simply by writing. The public exchange of vows in the presence of witnesses is required. And you have to know what you’re doing.
Odd, this. Normally TV advertisements are highly accurate sources of information about legal obligations.
Generally, yes. But remember that legal issues can only be determined within the facts as the court (or the jury) finds them. Therefore, if someone is conned into signing a contract, but the con man can convince the judge or jury that it was a perfectly honest agreement over which the signee now has remorse, then the court will apply the law as it exists w/r/t contracts that are entered into willfully. If it’s an enforceable agreement (which, as UDS noted, the contract in the advertisement would not be), then the court will require the signee to live up to his contractual duties.
I seem to remember a story about a woman who got engaged to a man who lived in a foreign country and had got the stage of resigning her job and selling her house so she could move to his country, marry and live with him when he called off the wedding - she sued him for breach of contract (loss of earnings, etc) and won. Perhaps it was apocryphal??
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So the cliche of going to Vegas, getting drunk and waking up married would result in a marriage contract that is not really valid?
You used to be able to sue for “breach of promise of marriage” and recover damages. In some places you probably still can. However you couldn’t oblige your sewer-rat fiance to marry you (whereas most other contracts, e.g. for the sale of property, you can enforce as opposed to just recovering damages.)
Yup. Mind you, the marriage would be on the register and, for practical reasons, you would have to go to court and establish in nullity proceedings that it was in fact void because you were too drunk to be aware of what you were doing, and get a declaration to that effect.
You can’t sue for breach of promise anymore, but in this case the woman had undergone significant financial and personal upheavel while relying on the groom’s assurances that he’d marry her. Typically (in U.S. law, at least), even when there’s no enforceable contract at issue, someone who reasonably relies to their detriment on otherwise non-enforceable promises by someone else (which are then broken) can sue under “promissory estoppel.”
A contract is a meeting of the minds between two people whereby each person promises to perform in exchange for a reciprocal promise to perform from the other person. (The kind of contract I just described is a bilateral contract; a unilateral contract is different, and not what you seem interested in here.)
So, even though we speak in terms of a contract being a piece of paper with writing on it, the piece of paper really is only evidence of a contract. There was obviously no meeting of the minds between the rock star and the fan, so no contract, notwithstanding the fact that the rock star signed a piece of paper full of "Whereas"s and "The party of the first part"s.
