Did any ancient legal systems require covenants/oaths/contracts to be made in the morning? “Then Abimelech went to him from Gerar, and Ahuzzath one of his friends, and Phichol the chief captain of his army. And Isaac said unto them, Wherefore come ye to me, seeing ye hate me, and have sent me away from you? And they said, We saw certainly that the Lord was with thee: and we said, Let there be now an oath betwixt us, even betwixt us and thee, and let us make a covenant with thee; That thou wilt do us no hurt, as we have not touched thee, and as we have done unto thee nothing but good, and have sent thee away in peace: thou art now the blessed of the Lord. And he made them a feast, and they did eat and drink. And they rose up betimes in the morning, and sware one to another: and Isaac sent them away, and they departed from him in peace.” (Genesis 26:26-31, KJV) Did any ancient legal system place any significance on oaths or agreements being made in the morning? It appears that Isaac and Abimelech and his companions discussed the agreement in the evening but did not formalize it until the morning. Was this actually required for legal purposes in any ancient jurisdictions? (In this case, it was an agreement between a king and another person, so &quot;laws&quot; aren't really relevant, but I'm curious if this was standard practice.) I don't want to debate the historicity of the Bible. I believe that this interaction truly did occur, but the question itself (did agreements have to be made in the morning?) is valid regardless of one's opinion on whether or not this really happened. I tagged this as contract-law because a contract seems to be the closest modern concept to the oath here.
If it means anything, it's probably about being sober rather than because of the time of day. To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing in the Bible or halakha that says oaths must be made in a specific part of the day. What we do find, in common with other ancient cultures, is an expectation that oath-making involves an invocation of divine authority, as the deity is being asked to punish someone if they break their agreement. Consequently, oath-making is often accompanied by a sacrifice (c.f. 2 Chronicles 15, or the Iliad book 3 for a non-Hebrew example), which needs a certain amount of preparation - not only finding the animal, but also being in a state of ritual purity. The precise wording and intent of the oath are also important, since one does not want to be bound to the wrong thing. All of this adds up to not doing the ceremony after a big party with lots of drinking. In this passage, they wait until morning, not because the morning is special in itself, but because it's undesirable to undertake a solemn religious commitment while inebriated or just tired. It may be that the morning is a &quot;good&quot; time because it's convenient to carry out morning prayers and ablutions and then immediately go on to the oath-making, but that does not mean that ancient Hebrew religious practice required promises to be made in the morning. In law, we also have the idea of being potentially held to an undesired agreement, if it was concluded while drunk or otherwise impaired. Legal systems differ in how they resolve it. The Talmud includes, for example: With regard to one who is intoxicated, his acquisition is a binding acquisition; that is, he cannot retract the transaction when he is sober, and similarly, his sale is a binding sale. Moreover, if he committed a transgression for which he is liable to receive the death penalty, he is executed; and if the offense is punishable by lashes, he is flogged. The principle is that he is like a sober person in all matters, except that he is exempt from prayer. (Eruvin 65a, trans. William Davidson) The covenant here is not a commercial contract, but would probably have included an element of prayer and sacrifice (even if not mentioned explicitly in the passage), and that is the part which demands sobriety. Roman law also had rules about impairment by reason of insanity, which is a similar idea; a permanently insane person cannot make contracts (Ulpian in Digest 3.5.3) but in other circumstances a drunk person might be held to their agreement. Somewhat to the contrary, drinking some amount of wine might be part of the formal oath ceremony in some cultures. In ancient Greece, as in the Iliad example, libations were made to the gods (especially Zeus Horkios, &quot;oath-keeper&quot;) and the wine would have been formally consumed. Herodotus also records (Histories 4.70) that the Scythian oath ceremony involved drinking a mixture of wine and blood. This does not mean that the participants were intoxicated - there was probably not much wine and it was probably not that strong - but I mention it for completeness. By the way, the part of the Talmud cited above also includes the statement from Rav Nachman that &quot;As long as I have not drunk a quarter-log of wine, my mind is not clear. It is only after drinking wine that I can issue appropriate rulings.&quot; Contemporary judges might or might not agree, but they'd be more circumspect in saying it.
It is the tenant's responsibility to understand the written contract. Oral statements about the contract do have to be consistent with the written contract (that is, in the context where you ask the landlord what a particular clause means before signing -- not in the case where you are modifying an existing contract). If I were renting a room and the contract says "Du må betale $1000 hver dag", which I don't understand because my Norwegian is terrible, I would ask about this, and the landlord might say that it means "You must pay $1000 every month", which could be a decent deal. Actually, the clause says "You must pay $1000 every day". When the reality of the situation becomes clear, then it is obvious that we didn't have an agreement in the first place. Perhaps he mis-spoke, or his English is as bad as my Norwegian, but I would not be held to rate in the written contract, assuming that I could back up my claim that he gave me that interpretation: the lease would probably be voided, as not an actual agreement. The underlying principle is that there has to be a "meeting of the minds" where the parties understand what they will get and what they must give, and there was a demonstrable failure of understanding. On the other hand, if I sign a contract without really reading it carefully, and there is a clause in English (which I speak) saying that I have to pay $1000 a day, but I didn't really think about the clause so that in a sense I didn't understand what I had agreed to, well, I may still be on the hook. (On the third hand, a court would probably say that's a ridiculous rent and void the contract on policy grounds). In general, "not my first language" is not a get-out-of-contract card, though attempts to trick people into signing documents in languages that they really have no understanding of won't be successful. Virtually nobody but a lawyer actually understands contractual language, yet contracts are enforced all the time. A contract can be explicitly modified by verbal agreement, or can be entirely verbal, but oral agreements face evidence problems, namely, what exactly did A and B say? It's scientifically well established that parties can be morally certain that the conversation went "A" (for one person) and "Not A" (for the other person). Using "could" rather than "would" in speech makes a huge difference in interpretation. There is a rule, the parol evidence rule, which essentially says that unless there is a good reason to not do so, the contract as written is what is enforced. Even if the conversation had been written into the contract, there's no basis in the contract for objectively determining whether a thing is old and "just broke". So even as an additional clause in the contract, it doesn't afford you a clear escape hatch. You might be able to prove with expert testimony that indeed the pipes had been corroding for a hundred years, and you could not have caused the pipes to burst.
The entire purpose of the Entire Agreement clause is to say that this contract is the agreement, and anything previously negotiated is not part of the agreement. I don't know why they would fail to include that in the contract.
would it be interpreted in favor of the person who did not draft the terms? Yes, provided that the interpretation is reasonable. That is known as the doctrine of contra proferentem. Here, the term "deliverables and associated documents" might entail a contradiction if that term [allegedly or literally] encompasses "source code or content". That depends on what definition(s) of "deliverables and associated documents" can be adduced from the contract. The term could refer to items that are not "source code or content", such as the binary files (i.e., executables and DLLs), instructions &amp; documentation on how to operate and troubleshoot the application, and so forth. In that case, there would be no contradiction because there is no overlap between these items and the source code. if term A) is written on line 10 and term B) is written on line 11, is it resonable to assume term B) takes precedence or modifies term A? No. The sequence of clauses/terms itself does not determine which one outweighs or qualifies the other. Instead, the language used in the contract is indicative of the parties' intent and therefore how the terms of that contract relate to each other.
Other than the oath (see the Coronation Oath Act), nothing at the ceremony has any legal significance. The coronation is a &quot;symbolic formality.&quot; The reign begins at the moment of the preceding monarch's death. The Coronation Oath, in which the monarch swears to govern the peoples of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth Realms “according to their respective laws and customs” is the only aspect of the ceremony which is required by law. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9412/
What's the use of contracts if you can't take a contract violator to court? A clear, thoughtful contract can be a deterrent to misconduct, and Australia is one of many jurisdictions where pro se litigation is allowed. Self-represented litigants certainly have to undergo a steep learning curve and are expected to comply with a code of conduct, procedural law, and so forth, but my point is that hiring a lawyer is not compulsory. Even if for some reason the defrauded party declines to sue the tortfeasor (thereby forfeiting the recovery of the losses), there is a societal obligation to alert others about the tortfeasor's misconduct. Making the contract available to others facilitates alerting them on objective grounds so they don't become the tortfeasor's next victim, and it simultaneously helps for setting the record straight that the damages/losses were not one's own fault. Without a contract, it would be more difficult for others get a sense of whether misconduct occurred at all. Or worst, halfway down the line, you don't have any money left to pay your lawyers, and they leave the case. Hence the importance to litigate in pro per from the start. It is easy for a person retaining a lawyer to postpone (be it due to family obligations, workload, and so forth) his learning of the law. But that postponement only makes the client more vulnerable to his lawyer's subsequent withdrawal when court proceedings are midway: the client would have the dilemma of either finding another lawyer to resume the case --predictably at a higher cost--, or cram the learning curve in trying to keep up with the proceedings.
The main relevant bit of constitutional law is Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872, where it was held that a general law against use of peyote does not violate the Free Exercise clause, though in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 a law specifically designed to restrict Santeria animal sacrifices is an undue burden on religion. The Employment Division court cites Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296 and Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 as the only cases where the First Amendment prevents a generally applicable law from applying in a religious context, which the court notes "are distinguished on the ground that they involved not the Free Exercise Clause alone, but that Clause in conjunction with other constitutional protections". The TRO doesn't go into detail about the reasoning: Based on the materials presented and the arguments of counsel, the court finds: (1) Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim alleging a violation of their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion So it is hard to say on what grounds the plaintiffs are likely to succeed. The governor's order is a bit peculiar, because it initially looks like a neutral 10-person limit on gatherings, but on the one hand makes an exception for religious events by allowing any number of people "officiating" so sets the limit on participants (advantage to religion, not constitutional), but then also includes numerous exceptions to the order, including schools, day-care, food pantries, detox centers, shopping malls, restaurants and so on. The set of exceptions is large enough that one might conclude that this is an undue burden on the exercise of religion. The breadth of the number of exceptions undermines claims of "necessity" which are crucial to any order that closes churches.
The parties can be required under oath to explain what they understand the plain meaning of the words to be. Where they disagree about the plain meaning of the words, they can use expert witnesses to give weight to their interpretation. Once the judge determines the plain meaning of the words (either by agreement between the parties or by reference to expert witnesses or other evidence), it is a matter of standard contract interpretation. Even in the case of an idioticon, where no expert witnesses are available, if the disagreement between the parties surrounds only a few words, the judge could find that there is no actual ambiguity because the context. Also, the judge could refer to parole evidence if needed. The purpose of the written contract is to provide evidence of your agreement. It is a bad idea to create evidence that you both may want to rely upon at some point if nobody else can understand it.