Tropers should rest (mostly) assured despite this:
- Civil code contract law has clauses against "obviously egregious" terms. That said, there's plenty of non-egregious ways a contract can harm you, not to mention what counts as legally "egregious" is only extremely outrageous things or something specifically mentioned in law. Judges typically only overturn a contract when it's clearly illegal. And the law very often does not prevent "unfair" contracts. After all, unnecessary technicalities are bad for business, right?
- Common-law (basically any English-speaking country outside the heavily French-influenced Quebec and Louisiana) courts will exclude anything in the fine print that the signor shouldn't expect, and are generally more favorable to signors than drafters when it comes to standard form contracts ("contracts of adhesion" in lawspeak—or sometimes Leonine Contract) under the doctrine of unconscionability.
- In fact, U.S. law prevents disclaimers from having any actual judiciary force. However, if it's not a standard form contract—i.e. you negotiated the contract out, personally or through a middleman, with the other guy—expect this trope to be the case, since both parties should have been paying attention when it was written.
Although, this can also get complicated:
- "I didn't know that the contract required me to ship 10,000 suspenders" is not an excuse
- "I didn't realise that my American business partner meant 'trousers' when the contract said 'pants'"/"And I didn't realize that my British partner meant 'garters' when the contract said 'suspenders'" might be
This is also an example of Eagleland Osmosis; historically, Anglo-American contract law was resistant to any attempt to get out of a contract; "hard law" was the rule of the day. However, over the course of the 20th century judges and legal scholars grew increasingly uncomfortable with the consequences of hard law, and adopted all kinds of rules to soften its impact to the point where this trope only really applies where many if not most folks would say "Yeah, you should probably have read the fine print," like:
- Unconscionability: Contract overwhelmingly favors the more powerful party
- Mistake: Misunderstanding/Innocence of a fact about the world material to the contract. Can be:
- Bilateral: The parties misunderstood each other/the world; a Briton sending "pants" in exchange for an American's "suspenders" would be an example, as would the buyer and seller of a house in another city that, unbeknownst to them, was at that moment being destroyed by a hurricane
- Unilateral: One party misunderstands, and the other should have known about the misunderstanding and cleared things up)
- Frustration of purpose: Whatever it was you wanted the contract for was taken away by outside forces. This doctrine came up when someone rented a room to watch Edward VII's coronation procession, only to find that the coronation was delayed because the King was ill. Sure the lessee could still sit in the room, but without a procession to watch, what's the point?
- Impossibility: The classic case is this:
- Seller ships buyer 5,000 pairs of pants (either sense) from Bangladesh to Britain by container ship. While passing through the Red Sea, the ship gets attacked by Somali pirates.
- The container containing the pants falls to the bottom of the sea. Seller doesn't have to deliver the pants or send another 5,000 pairs, because the shipment was destroyed, precluding contractual performance.*
- Impracticability: A California innovation—"We could do it, but something unforeseeable happened that makes it prohibitively expensive"
Courts in non-common-law jurisdictions are even more hostile to fine print, and will likely rule any fine print clauses in standard form contracts to be unenforceable. In countries based on Roman law, the civil code heavily restricts the types of clauses that can be put into these sorts of contracts.
Recent changes to contract law in many places also enforce a defiance to this trope, at least in the exaggerated way it's been shown most often in comedic works, with a standardized font size for all text within the contract—simply said, if it's so small that you need something more powerful than a magnifying glass to read it (and that can only be justified if your vision is poor), then it's unenforceable by default.
Issues because the contract was written in a language the signer did not know are still struggled over (depending on such things like whether or not there is a record/witnesses of the exchange), but it is normally expected that if the signer at any point says before signing that he doesn't understands what the contract says the other party will either give a contract that can be understood or back off until the signer can find someone that can help him translate.
In any case, one can contractually rescind any of one's legal rights except for bodily freedom and life. Joining the military, working for the government (FBI, CIA), or just agreeing to arbitration (giving up your right to sue in court) in a contract are such ways.