Do legal tender laws prevent &quot;no cash&quot; restaurants? This story about restaurants that only accept electronic payment set me wondering. I know that under legal tender laws a business can set a policy on what forms of payment it will accept, but that only applies if no debt exists prior to the time of payment. I think this creates a problem for restaurants trying to impose a "no cash" policy. Normally you only pay for your meal after you have eaten it, so the debt is incurred when you eat the meal, and the payment happens some minutes later. Am I right in thinking that that legal tender laws would apply in this situation? If you provide payment in cash, the restaurant cannot then claim you haven't paid your debt. Note: not a duplicate of this question because it did not consider the delay between incurring the debt and paying it.
No A debt is created by a contract (among other ways not relevant here). A contract for a restaurant does not contemplate the creation of a debt, payment is to be contemporaneous with the service. Presuming that the customer was made aware that cash payment was not acceptable and that they chose to enter the contract, by ordering, then they accepted that term. Not abiding by it is a breach of the contract. Now, if the customer did not pay and the restaurant sued for the amount (plus damages) and won, that would be a debt for which cash must be accepted.
In placing an order (for anything, not just in a restaurant) and in the supplier accepting it then a legally binding verbal contract has been created. There are terms that come into being implicitly: some come from statute law and some from common law. For example, in most jurisdictions there will be either a common law or specific statute that requires the product to be of merchantable quality and fit for the purpose the customer explicitly or implicitly made known to the vendor. In a restaurant, this means that the food must be presented in a way that enables you to eat it and it must be fit for human consumption. It also means that, in the absence of a time for delivery being specified, that the meal must be delivered within a reasonable time. Reasonable has a specific legal meaning and is an objective test: what an ordinary, reasonable and prudent person would expect in the specific circumstances. It is clear that a reasonable time varies with the circumstances. Reasonable in McDonalds is different from reasonable in a 3 Michelin star restaurant and also different from the same McDonald's when it is obvious to the customer that they are currently insanely busy. If the supplier does not supply the goods and services within a reasonable time then they have breached a term of the contract. The customer has several options: repudiate the contract and sue for damages if this is a breach of a condition of the contract (a condition is a term that is fundamental to the contract; late delivery of food probably isn't a condition), repudiate the contract and sue for damages if this is a major breach of a term of the contract (late delivery probably is), sue for damages if this is an intermediate breach of a term or a breach of a warranty. Enough generalities, for your specific queries: What law in involved in restaurant orders? Contract law, consumer protection law, health and safety law, business law, food hygiene laws, tax laws etc. etc. If I go into a restaurant and order hundreds of dollars of food, then leave before it arrives, I would imagine there is some recourse that the proprietor could take. Sure, there is a contract, you breached it, the restaurant can sue for damages. In addition, they could make a complaint to the police that you have acted fraudulently by ordering food you never intended to pay for. However, if I order a single item and it doesn't show up for over an hour, despite me inquiring about it's status, would I be compelled to pay? It depends on if an hour is a reasonable time or not. By inquiring you have demonstrated that you don't believe that it is but you may not be "an ordinary, reasonable and prudent person". If the breach is actual and egregious enough then you probably have the right to repudiate the contract; that means the contract is at an end and neither of you have any further obligations under it including an obligation to pay. That said, you would be on surer ground if you attempted to renegotiate the contract to make time a condition. "Look, if the meal is not here in 15 minutes, I'm leaving"; if the restaurateur accepts this renegotiation by, for example, saying "I'm terribly sorry, we will sort it out" then your position is much clearer.
The "point" of including bank-interest income on your tax return rather than having the government automatically deduct what it feels that you would owe is that the government is not legally empowered to take money away from you in that fashion. The government is legal empowered to compel you to pay your taxes, and there are numerous rules enacted as law or as a consequence of laws passed. You can read the various relevant laws here. There simply is no general law that says that banks must withhold taxes on interest. There might be a specific case when an entity is subject to backup withholding (as a response to a taxpayer not following certain rules). There are also special rules regarding non-resident alien withholding, which could require interest withholding. Apart from the intrinsic political unpopularity of imposing new withholding requirements on people, it is difficult to compute the correct amount to withhold, since not all interest is taxable. In theory, a set of rules could be constructed to require withholding of interest income, if Congress were to pass a law similar to 26 USC 3402.
It depends in part on what you mean by &quot;money&quot;. US $100 bills are a prime example of &quot;money&quot;. Art 1 §10 Cl. 1 of the US Constitution says No State shall ...coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts... Under the constitution, only the federal government can &quot;print money&quot; in the &quot;universally usable&quot; sense. Anyone can print or otherwise &quot;emit&quot; objects with economic value, and such objects can be voluntarily accepted in trade. State and local governments can incur debts and thus spend money now that they do not yet have, as long as there is no legal limit on a government's ability to go into debt. California could issue IOU-bucks with the intent that a holder could redeem them as real federal money or as gold or silver at some point. This limits the ability of a state treasury to print money, since in principle and practice it is redeemable in gold or silver. Each state has some set of laws and constitutional provisions that prevent writing rubber checks ad infinitum, for example only allowing debt for large capital projects (building) and requiring voter approval; requiring expenditures to not exceed projected revenues; granting emergency debt-mitigation powers (e.g. hiring freezes) to the governor when a state does go into unauthorized debt. In California, Art IV §12 of the state constitution requires a balanced budget, meaning that the state cannot create infinite obligations without infinite revenues. From the legal perspective, private banks do not create money, although non-legally, people may talk about what banks do as &quot;creating money&quot;. At that point in the discussion, we will have left law and moved to the realm of economic theory.
First of all, anyone can sue for more or less anything, with a good case or without. We have no possible way to predict who will sue or for what. What we might be able to predict is whether in certain circumstances a suit has plausible legal merit, and if someone filed such a suit, there would be a reasonable chance of winning it. Even that often depends on detailed facts which cannot be discussed or addressed here. Trademark protection is limited in several ways. First of all, trademark protection is limited by country. Each country has a different set of trademark laws, and a different mechanism for registering trademarks or determining which marks are protected, although there are many similarities. If a mark is protected in the US, that does not give grounds for suit in Canada, although if Canadian products or services are sold into the US, there could be a suit there. Secondly, trademarks are protected for specific industries or kinds of products/services. for example, "Bass Ale" is a well-known trademark for a beverage. But that does not mean that "Bass Media" used to identify a media company, would infringe that mark, because a drink and a media company are very different things, and one would not be likely to be confused with the other. Thirdly, some marks are "descriptive" while others are "distinctive" or "original". For example, "Tasty burgers" is descriptive. It describes the product (or claims to, at least). "Quadzos Burgers" is original. It is a coined word that has no meaning except to name this product. Original marks get significantly stronger protection than descriptive marks. Fourthly, Trademarks only protect against uses in trade, or in commerce. If you are not selling anything, or doing business using a mark, you are probably not infringing that mark's protection. Finally, and most important, the key question is whether a reasonable person in the market would be confused into thinking that the alleged infringer is the same as the maker of the goods or services named by the mark, or is endorsed or approved by that maker. Trademark protection is supposed to prevent one person or firm from benefiting by the reputation and good will of a product or firm with which they have no connection, from, in effect, falsely advertising "I am the same as those guys". If no reasonable person will be confused, then there is probably no infringement. If reasonable people might well be confused, there might well be infringement.
Is there a law regarding this? The relevant law is the Employment Standards Act of British Columbia which only requires an employer to provide meal breaks for employees but not somewhere for them to eat their meal. (1) An employer must ensure (a) that no employee works more than 5 consecutive hours without a meal break, and (b) that each meal break lasts at least 1/2 hour. What legal actions are possible? None - unless there's a breach of, say, health and safety legislation by allowing meals to be eaten in a refuse area, but that's off-topic.
As a matter of contract law it would not be possible to enforce a requirement to pay legal fees without agreement. You could easily see how this would be problematic: one could just draft letters to hundreds or thousands of people and require them to pay the costs of composing the letter. My understanding is that this is common practice in the United States (see speculative invoicing). However, people are generally free to pay whatever they want to anyone they want. The other side is free to pay the legal costs, they just probably won't. In some common law jurisdictions, the concept of a Calderbank offer may be another reason to write a letter such as this; the settlement offer can be relied upon in later proceedings as an indication as to the costs that would be appropriate to award to the winning party, should the offeree unnecessarily prolong legal proceedings
There are both statutes and customs aimed at preventing "Malicious Prosecution" and "Abuse of Process." (In Pennsylvania, for example, the 1980 Dragonetti Act allows the victim of a frivolous lawsuit to counter-sue for compensatory damages.) One can also buy insurance against this type of risk: Umbrella liability policies will generally provide a defense against civil lawsuits and any damages awarded, as will many business insurance policies. Of course, none of this is to say that a skilled legal team can't avoid all of these countermeasures and, in practice, take up a significant amount of your time and trouble. We do not have a perfect system of justice.