On The Regulations Of The Standard Form Contract

Format contract is beneficial to reduce of transactional cost and civil circulation with its Briefness and convenience. The enterprises that provide format contract may get rid of complicated contractual negotiations and put more energy into the operation and management of enterprises. However, the drawbacks of format contract are very obvious, which restricts the counterpart's freedom of contract. Although the party who provides format contract cannot force the other party to accept format clause, the other party always has no choice but to accept this clause. In this circumstance, the party who provides format contract always makes use of its superiority of position to set unfair clauses in format contract, which may infringe upon counterpart's interests.Just in view of above-said characteristics of format contract, laws of most countries in the world confirm format contract and give play to its advantages and while they tend to over its drawbacks by means of controlling format contract. This paper mainly expounds the control of format contract from four aspects, legislative control, judicial control, administrative control and social control, from which former two aspects this paper emphatically probes into. The legislative control refers to the controlling ways to regulate drawbacks of format contract by stipulating related law. Legislative control is a basic way to solve drawbacks of format contract, and it is the basis for other controlling ways to exist. The legislative control to format contract, there are two aspects that need to be considered, one is the legislative system, another is core content of legislation. In legislative system legislative control to format contract shall be divided into the control by general law and the control by special law. With regard to the aspect of legislative core of format contract, legislations in most countries all make control of drawbacks of formatcontract that is also regulation of unfair contractual clause the core.The judicial control to drawbacks of format contract refers to the treatment by court to disputes on format contracts, to eliminate the influence of unfair contractual clauses in format contract, and to safeguard the contractual counterpart's interests. It is different from legislative control; through the judgment for individual cases it combines the legislative provisions with specific cases to control drawbacks in format contracts, which has the characteristics of individualism and detaining character.The administrative control of format contract refers to the activities whereby the administrative organizations rule and regulate the content of format contract according to legal regulations, inspect and supervise the application of format contract, in order to prevent and correct unfair clauses in format contract. It is an active control, by which administrative organizations shall directly enter into the regulation and application of format contract in accordance with their authorities, directly require parties to correct unfair clauses in format contract.The social control of format contract refers to the social supervises conducted by consumer organizations and related social groups by using their social influence and instruments of propaganda and mediums on application of format contract to the users of format contract. The general ways are as following: 1. The consumer-protection organizations and other groups always take active part in drawing up the clauses of format contract. 2. They assist with consumers to deal with the disputes on format contract with business runners. 3. They criticize the business runners for using unfair contractual clauses to damage consumers' interests and appeal to the helps of instruments of propaganda.