I was browsing Terms of Use - Jet's Pizza for no good reason, and noticed something that I have noticed in many disclaimers and EULAs: the presence of certain sections being in all capital letters. What is the reason for this? Is there some requirement that certain disclaimers be written in such way? It seems really odd.
To ensure that they apply to “sovereign citizens”, of course.
More seriously, when I have seen this it is always to draw attention to important clauses that the writer of the document wishes to highlight. And, of course, the most important clauses tend to be in the small print in normal case.
Looking at the document in the link, it occurred to me that the writer may well have cut-and-pasted those parts from elsewhere and couldn’t be bothered to re-write them in lower case.
That’s a mighty lazy author. For years now Word and other similar apps have had a one-button way to convert between ALL CAPS, all lower case, All Title Case, and All sentence case. It isn’t perfect; it wrecks acronyms / initialisms. But other than that it works great.
The legit answer is emphasis. All caps are also commonly used in section headers.
This all stems from the tradition that legal stuff is prepared on typewriters with exactly one font and no size, bolding, or other means of indicating emphasis beyond all caps.
Whether any given work is using all caps well is a different question.
Am wondering if it is a holdover from the days of photocopying. The readability of uppercase letters is better preserved when a document is photocopied, especially after multiple generations.
As you can see, They do use caps legitimately in headers, but also, in a seemingly random fashion, in the main text. It doesn’t look more important than the other stuff, and one part is even highlighted in red, so I still think that it is a lazy cut & paste job. Possible - not even by someone with legal training. It is only a Pizza website.
I hadn’t bothered to look at the OP’s cite/site. I was just speaking in generalities.
Agree that site’s disclaimer looks like something pieced together from several other sites’ disclaimers and EULAs. It’s not strictly speaking redundant, but it sure is overkill given the site’s content and what end-users can do on it.
I especially like the red part near the top saying their privacy policy is incorporated by reference. You know, the privacy policy that’s not available anywhere on the website. Later on their reference their Privacy Policy (with uppercase Ps) in two adjacent sentences. One in italics, one not. Friggin’ amateurs.
LSLGuy is correct – the use of caps in legal writing was a for lawyers to emphasize important parts of a document in the days before computerized text formatting (i.e., typewriters). As much legal writing, especially contract drafting, relies on previously drafted forms, the use of caps to emphasize certain parts of a document has stuck to this day.
You sometimes see a similar phenomenon with caselaw citation. In printed legal documents, the case name of a legal citation is nowadays mostly set in italics. But typing in italics was not possible with early typewriters, so lawyers underlined the casename instead. Even today, some lawyers and judges continue to underline the casename, when the use of electronic word processing makes italicization trivial.
This. There is a legal principle that says that the more unusual a clause is, the more prominently displayed that clause must be. For example, if you wrote a 20-page contract on the sale of a house and somewhere in the contract you specified that the down payment has to be paid in brand new crisp $2 bills otherwise the purchaser agrees to pay the buyer a penalty of one million dollars, you can’t bury the clause in fine print on page 17. You have to put it in bold face, all caps, 20-point font, on the front page, if you don’t want it thrown out of court.
IANAL
Thanks for the various answers. I realized when I was going to sleep that it might be partially a case of needing to emphasize certain parts and the only way one originally had available was to make it all caps. With the heavy influence of precedence in legal affairs, people continued to do it even when they had other means of emphasis available to them, copy things precisely from what was used before.
The Uniform Commercial Code says some text needs to be conspicuous. UCC 1-201(b)(10) defines “conspicuous” and states factors courts may look to to determine if text is conspicuous. Among the factors is capitals.
I think there is probably a lot of inertia involved in legal documents. If there is the slightest risk that a judge will throw out a document that doesn’t meet with his standard of “proper legal form”, everyone will knock themselves out making the form proper – in other words, the way it has always been done. And court documents look just like they looked 200 years ago.
We had a power of attorney refused by a bank because the “Notice” page (first page of the PoA) was not all caps, which apparently is a requirement of Pennsylvania law. Same PoA had been accepted for years by other institutions, including the county recorder’s office. The attorney who drew up the PoA said the bank was just being a PITA.
This is a bit of a old wives’ tale. While italicization was not available in the days of typewriters, there are good reasons to continue using underlining. For one thing, italics are used to denote emphasis and to identify foreign phrases. For another, rules of procedure typically prefer that authorities be underlined.
I disagree that you can describe it as an old wive’s tale when there’s not factual dispute that in the days of typewriters the only way to emphasize the case name in briefs and memos is to underline instead of italicize. If the rules required that authorities be emphasized, it certainly would make practical sense that the emphasis be in the form of underlining, given the practical realities that in the old days briefs and other documents were typed on a typewriter.
I’ve not come across any current procedural rules that call for underlining of authorities, but then again I practice in the US federal courts – things are obviously different in Canadian courts.
Er, I’m not in Canada.
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We’d love to have you, RNATB! 
Well, obviously it has its appeal - nice Dopers like your good self included - but it’s 56 degrees in Central Florida right now and I’m already too cold.
It’s all a matter of personal comfort - when we were at DisneyWorld, I concluded that Florida was just not for me - too hot and humid! Came back to Canada and nice 10 C weather and felt refreshed.
Considering the number of Quebec license plates in my FL beachfront town each Nov-Mar, you may be the only Canadian left up there during White season. Try to keep the lights on for your wandering compatriots.
Besides, Orlando is probably the crappiest combo of hot and sweaty in all of FL. There’s a reason Disney bought his land there: it was cheap because nobody else wanted it.