I got fined – and then wrote an assignment about it

This article was originally written as a small assignment for my “Research Design” class in April 2019. It might be interesting to read this, because the task was to come up with a very mundane example of law and then think about how we could do academic research about it.

When boarding public transport, an individual enters into a contractual relation with the metro service. When going back to The Hague after visiting my parents in the block break, I needed to take the metro to reach Hamburg’s Central Station, and thus also needed to pay for the service I was being provided with. My mother already had the official app of the metro service on her phone, and offered to buy the ticket for me and send it to me. We both knew that it was possible to manually edit the name of the person who the ticket is for, and thus personalize it. Together, we proceeded to pay, checked the box that we accepted the conditions of the purchase, and then tried to forward my ticket to me. However, we realized that this was somehow not possible – there was no PDF to be sent nor a link to download the ticket from another phone. We shrugged, my mother sent a screenshot of the ticket to me, and I decided that I would simply show that screenshot if anyone asked me on the metro. Besides – in the 8 years that I had lived in Hamburg previously, I had never been checked. Why would I now, on a Friday at noon? Of course, a metro official boarded the metro soon after me and asked for my ticket. When I showed him my screenshot, he said that this was not sufficient. A screenshot was not the original – I should have downloaded the app myself, and logged into it with my mother’s account. I offered that I could do that now, I would just quickly download the app and then show him the original, but he said that I would have needed the actual ticket at the time when he asked. He handed out a fine of 60 Euros, and only when I asked about options to appeal did he tell me where I could call. That evening, having arrived back in The Hague, I called my mother, and together we intensively brainstormed and googled what we could do – after all, 60 Euros is a hefty sum of money, and we felt like injustice had been done. In the end, we sent a formal, polite e-mail to the metro service, explaining that we felt there had been a misunderstanding, and a couple of days later got a reply that the fine had been reduced to a mere 3,50 Euros. Despite my success, I cannot help but think that many other people are likely to have experienced the same injustice and accepted their fate of paying the fine.

This situation made me think a lot about the nature of law, and specifically this manifestation contract law in which there was a clear knowledge and power imbalance. The metro is a large institution with its own rules of procedure and website; although the contract of buying a ticket is supposed to be based on an equal footing, a client inevitably perceived the metro as having supremacy and all the say in what will happen. When the metro officer fined me, I was struck by fact that he did not care about my story and reasoning – if I wanted to appeal against his decision, that was my choice to make, but by his behaviour he made it clear that his word would count more than mine. The overall scenario reminded me of the critical perspective of law, in which a dominant elite has the power to define laws and use them to maintain inequalities that benefit them as a group.

When buying the ticket, I had accepted the terms and conditions, but of course I had not actually read them, and I was given a fine because I truly had breached the knitty-gritty conditions. In the end, my fine was revoked by me just asking nicely, but the fact that the metro exercised lenience created an impression of benevolence from their side instead of an impression of fairness and justice. Overall, the incident left me wondering about de facto power imbalances in contract relationships regarding essential services such as transport. Even though I may be blamed for the fact that I did not actually read the terms and conditions, I do not know of anyone who does. This raises questions such as whether terms and conditions are made to seem “scary” and complicated and a waste of time on purpose in order to maintain the power imbalance.

My story leads to three main hypotheses:

1. Terms and conditions are phrased in a complicated manner, and only the service provider regards them as relevant.
2. Metro officials hand out fines for any inconvenience, because they know that the law they created themselves is usually in their favour.
3. Clients who received a fine may feel helpless and not think about contacting the service centre because of perceived unfairness of the system.

Ultimately, research could be done on all three of these issues, and each would be best tackled by using a critical legal approach. The following research questions could be studied, each of them fitting different methods:

• How are terms and conditions perceived by individuals?
  • Interviews.
• What factors contribute to terms and conditions being phrased in such a complicated manner?
  • Literature review of metro policies and documents, drafting histories, and interviews with regulatory officials.
• What factors determine how metro officials hand out fines?
  • Participant observation.
• What is the social role that metro officials assume?
  • Non-participant observation.
• Do metro officials sometimes hand out fines despite there being no violation, and believe that there will be no ramifications?
  • Case reviews, insight into metro-internal documents.
• How do clients respond to receiving a fine?
  • Interviews and non-participant observations.
• What barriers exist to clients making claims against their fine?
  • Interviews.