How come you can put random ridiculous claims in contracts in yor USA without this having no legal power?
It seems to us from the outside that the legal system of USA no longer makes any sense. What is bad that USA forces other countries to copy its broken legal system.
The contract forces mandatory, individual, arbitration.
Congress passed a law that allows contracts to force this.
This law has been around quite a while. Wikipedia says 1925, and i'm too lazy to look up if that's correct, but I know there are cases on it dating back to at least 1984.
It was only recently (~5 years ago) that they started to use it to ban class action lawsuits (instead forcing individual arbitration). The act neither explicitly allows or precludes this.
Before you say that should make the answer obvious, realize class action lawsuits are entirely a judicial creation. There is no law that was ever passed to create the idea of a class action lawsuit, it was created entirely from whole cloth (well, imported is a better description) by judges.
Somewhat ironically, the supreme court that folks are yelling about is also the same court that basically created the notion of representative in the US.
You can get into some serious trouble. Stuff like voiding the whole contract and providing an easy way to sue. The problem is that nobody knows everything that is illegal, even lawyers and judges get tasked with determining legality and maliciousness. Heck, try to get the complete list of federal regulations.
It often is illegal to make a contract to do something illegal.
However, the contracts are usually written to say that any parts which are found to be illegal are severed from the contract, so as long as such clauses are allowed, very few contracts are likely to illegal.
It seems to us from the outside that the legal system of USA no longer makes any sense. What is bad that USA forces other countries to copy its broken legal system.