What does it mean that something is enforceable? What does it mean that a contract (or a sentence) is enforceable? Does it always mean that force can be used to fulfil such contract? Does it always mean that failing to fulfil such contract would result in a jail sentence for whomever has failed to fulfil it? Are there kinds or degrees of enforceability?
You can obviously write anything into a contract that you like. However, the laws of your country always apply, and the laws can tell you that some things are not valid, even if they are in a contract. Such things cannot be enforced. Things in a contract that are valid according to the laws can be enforced. An extrem example would be a contract saying &quot;user6726 pays gnasher $20,000, and gnasher kills user6726's spouse&quot;. Since killing your spouse is a very serious crime, even if we both signed it, and even if you paid the $20,000, you couldn't enforce me doing my side of the contract. What does it mean if we say a contract can be enforced? It means if we both sign a contract, and you do your side of the bargain, and I don't do mine, then you can take me to court. If the court agrees, the court can order me to do what the contract says, and/or to pay you damages. If I refuse, the court has ways to &quot;convince&quot; me to do my side of the bargain. For example, they could send bailiffs to my home, who take my property and sell it in an auction to pay for what I should have paid. They can not in most countries send me to jail. Sometimes one side cannot fulfil their side of the contract. If there is a contract that you build a brand new home for me, and I pay you a million dollar, but I not only don't have the money but am hugely in debt, then I can't pay you. Some people will say that you can't enforce your contract which is legally imprecise. You can take me to court etc., but you can't take money from my empty pockets. I might be in trouble though if I signed the contract knowing that I can't pay you; that could be criminal fraud and I might go to jail if a judge and jury believe that I committed fraud.
I've never heard the phrase used this way, and it wouldn't make any sense, anyway; &quot;indemnity&quot; is security against a consequence, so the existence of civil and criminal consequences would be a double non-indemnification. Maybe ask the lecturer for a published example of this usage.
So, the plain meaning rule is a general rule, and, as with most general legal rules, there are exceptions. One such exception is that if a statute uses a word that has a commonly understood legal meaning, even if that differs from the ordinary meaning, then that legal meaning applies. &quot;Persons&quot; is commonly understood in legalese to include corporations (just take my word for it), so when used in a statute it's going to include corporations and other entities. A similar example is that the word &quot;he,&quot; when used in a statute, is not construed to only include males within its ambit. Note that there can be exceptions to this rule too. Since your example is a criminal statute, note that, under certain circumstances, criminal liability can be imputed to a corporation or other entity.
Why isn't forcing users to accept new Terms of Service by threatening financial loss, (like denying access to purchased content, or inhibiting or prohibiting the ability to earn an income), considered extortion and therefore illegal? Usually this is not illegal, and even if it is, it usually doesn't constitute extortion (or extortion's civil counterpart, which is called &quot;duress&quot;, which is an affirmative defense to contract enforcement). Generally speaking, exercising a legal right someone already has, for a purpose that is not improper, does not constitute extortion. A TOS Rarely Creates A Reasonable Expectation That It Won't Change Most importantly, in the case of terms of service governed information technology services, the firm that creates the terms of service reserves, at the outset, the right to change them at any time. So, the user has no reasonable expectation that the terms of service won't change in a manner that they dislike. There is no implied promise to never change anything material about the service. Terms of service are usually specifically drafted from the outset to avoid creating something that looks like a property interest on the part of the user in having the service continue to work in a particular manner. TOS Terms May Not Be Unconscionable Both the original terms of service and any subsequent amendment of them, is not permitted to be &quot;unconscionable&quot; (e.g. it can't make the life of your first born child a liquidated damages provision that applies if the terms of service are breached). But, there isn't much of a legally protected reliance interest in not having the terms of service changed in this situation (although almost every general rule could conceivably have some exception to it, probably far more factually extreme than the fact patterns identified in the question). If a term is unconscionable, it may not be enforced as contrary to public policy, without regard to what prior versions of the same agreement may have stated. TOS Changes Are Usually Prospective Only On the other hand, a terms of service amendment is generally only effective prospectively and does not generally change rights that have fully accrued and vested prior to their amendment, at least until the user takes some act to affirmatively continue to use the service going forward. When there are vested rights under old versions, the remedy is not to characterize the change as extortion, however. It is to not apply the amendment to the terms of service retroactively to the already vested rights. For example, if the old terms of service did not contain an arbitration clause, and litigation was in progress under the old terms based upon old transactions, and then a new terms of service were adopted that mandated arbitration, this amendment would not generally be applied to require the pending lawsuit in court to be stayed and transferred to an arbitration forum. The right to litigated vested when the lawsuit was filed.
Normally, statutes don't crawl out of law books and enforce themselves. And, government officials have broad sovereign immunity for most of their activities, so in most cases the only remedy available if someone in the government doesn't enforce a law according to its terms is to seek an injunction ordering the government to carry out the law. Impossibility is a defense to an injunction request. Also, enforcement of many laws is vested entirely in the discretion of the executive branch and can't be compelled judicially at all. When compliance can be judicially compelled because someone has standing to do so and the language makes the action required by statute truly mandatory, short of demanding full compliance with the law, a judge can set deadlines for compliance (a recent example of that involved a judge ordering the federal government to reunite migrant parents and children who had been separated). In the absence of a court order, the attorney-general for the jurisdiction (or an assistant AG tasked with the job) and the chain of command managers responsible for the function and often aides on the chief executive's staff will come up with a compliance plan that is within the realm of the possible. If none of those approaches is workable, the chief executive or top aides to the chief executive will typically approach friendly members of the legislature to seek a legislative work around. A substantial share of the bills in Congress or a state legislature at any given time that almost never make headlines are bills addressing situations like these that come up from time to time, for example, when a statutory requirement that used to become workable, ceases to be due to unavailability of resources or some technical barrier. Most of these bills pass on a bipartisan basis as a matter of course without the general public even noticing it. Most large omnibus laws are followed a few months later by a technical corrections bill address problems discovered in trying to implement the law.
"Tamper" implies action taken with intend to improperly change the meaning. "Alter" simply means "change". "Mutilate" simply means "damage" but in this context implies "Make unreadable". "Obliterates" here means 'make unreadable" or "remove". As a practical matter, there is not much if any difference between these words in this context, and no authority will spend any time at all considering whether some action is 'tampering" or "mutilation". The word "or" is used precisely to avoid such arguments. Any of these shades of meaning is equally forbidden. English-language laws and regulations often specify multiple synonyms or near-synonyms , connecting them with "or" so that anything within the more general scope of the concept is included. Charles Rembar, in his book The Law of the Land, asserted that this dated to the period in England shortly after the Norman Conquest, and that lawyers tended to include equivalent terms from Latin, Norman French, and English. He mentions such combinations as "Give, devise, and bequeath" and "Promise, covenant, and agree" as typical and often-used examples of this tendency. When this sort of multiple terminology is used, it is generally only useful to try to understand what is covered by the combined phrase, and of no value to try to determine which term covers which part of the concept. In the cited cases, anyone who tries to change a passport to say something that the government didn't intend, or who tries to damage or destroy a passport, or anything similar, would be guilty of the forbidden act. And similarly, anyone who tries to make an MVID read differently, or to make it unreadable, would be guilty.
it's not illegal to sign a contract that demands illegal things, however, such a contract, in general, is called an illegal contract. Illegal contracts are null and void. Contracts that violate public policy never have force in the first place. A contract can't force people to declare lies under oath or demand them to murder someone. Thus, a contract demanding such is illegal. As a result, such a clause would not just be unenforceable, it might void the entire contract wholesale if it is not severable. In the least, any clause demanding illegal acts was null and void ab initio, and never was valid. void contracts in law germany explicitly makes contracts void that are &quot;Sittenwidrig&quot; in § 138 BGB and also illegal ones in § 134 BGB Declarations to the Agentur für Arbeit are made under threat of perjury, and thus lying is illegal. It is also Sittenwidrig. This makes the provision void. Murder is illegal, inciting to murder someone is illegal, and so a contract to murder someone for pay is void. Such a contract also is Sittenwidrig. Selling the right to ask to marry your daughter per see isn't illegal, but it is Sittenwidrig and as such the contract is void. california judges refer to such contracts as illegal contracts, defining this as a test where making non-enforcement of such a contract something of public interest: It is in the public interest that people tell the truth to the unemployment office, so a contract demanding you to lie is illegal. It is illegal to lie on the stand (perjury), and thus the contract is illegal. Conspiracy However, the contract can also be evidence of criminal activity in itself: It manifests the will of two parties to commit an illegal act. That is the core of a conspiracy charge. Conspiracy is illegal and usually a felony. germany: Conspiracy to commit a crime is §30 STGB
No enforceable contract can contain illegal clauses and work Contracts can not remove some rights and never can bypass obligations. Talking to the police at times is a requirement by law, as is taking to the labor board. Responding to a subpoena is legally forced by the court. An NDA might limit the amount what you can say, and a contract might limit who you can sue, but can not ban you from suing at all. In germany, a contract that tries to curtail such requirements would be Sittenwidrig and make all clauses that try to limit the rights fully Void and nill ab initio - in fact, it can be used as evidence against the drafting party that they tried to do so. So to stay legal and keep the clause working in the limited fashion where it is not demanded, the clause cuts the contract to explicitly exclude such situations.