On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Alex Smith wrote:
> It doesn't claim to be a pledge, and it only has one party (if that).
> Therefore, it cannot by definition be a contract.
Murphy offers a service which is binding onto em. You accept by acting on
it. This is a common-language agreement. There is no current text which
says that the contract must impose obligations on all parties. The first
sentence of R1742 covers this. It is in the best interests of the game,
and historically correct, to treat agreements which transfer game abilities
as such. Again, CFJ1921 covers this pretty clearly; and it also doesn't
wholly matter what your exact belief at the time was; as a reasonable
observer, this appeared to be a binding agreement, and you explicitly
accepted upon action, thus R101(iii) protections are satisfied.
To put it clearly, here's my proto:
Granting "act on behalf of" grants what is legally called power-of-attorney.
Since power-of-attorney is not explicitly defined in the Rules, we must
defer to legal definitions of the term (R754{3}). Under legal definitions,
a power-of-attorney is "a legal instrument authorizing one to act as the
attorney or agent of the grantor" (MW-Online).
Thus we have a legal instrument with two parties, an agent and a grantor.
This fits a reasonable definition of a two-party legal and binding agreement,
and thus a two-party contract.
We actually have a stronger case for construing a contract here than in
CFJ 1921 (where a contract was also construed) as in this case there is
clearly a legal binding instrument to consider. This also strongly fits
Judge Zefram's "natural" mapping of flexible and historical PoAs onto
binding agreements [CFJ 1719].
The fact that such an offer, when made and accepted, is seen by both
parties as a granting of power and a legal instrument, means that (even
prior to this judgement) a reasonable person would understand that by
making or accepting a PoA offer, they are agreeing to transfer legal
authority in a binding manner, and that, if explicit agreement was not
communicated beforehand, the agent's use the PoA is explicit consent to
use it, therefore this interpretation satisfied R101(iii).
-Goethe
