1. Are forum selection clauses always enforceable? Put another way, under what situations will a court notenforce a forum selection clause?
2. In its order, the court refers to the “persuasive authority” of several district court decisions involving Facebook users in previous cases. Nevertheless, was the judge obligated as a matter of law to follow these previous decisions? Why or why not?
Ricky Franklin received a series of unsolicited text messages from Facebook
on his cell phone. (For example, one unsolicited text message read: “Today is Sara Glenn’s birthday. Reply to post on her Timeline or reply to post ‘Happy Birth-day!’”) Franklin sued Facebook in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, alleging that Facebook violated the Telephone Con-sumer Protection Act (TCPA), a federal law enacted in 1991, as well as Georgia law. In response to Franklin’s complaint, Facebook filed a Motion to Transfer Venue, requesting the district court to enforce the forum selection clause in Facebook’s terms of service, which every Facebook user must agree to when creating a Facebook account, and to transfer the case to the federal district court in Northern California. Specifically, Facebook argued Franklin was contractually bound to Facebook’s terms of service, which includes a forum selection clause requiring “any claim, cause of action or dispute (claim)” against
Facebook must be brought exclusively in either “the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California or a state court located in San Mateo County.” Franklin opposed Facebook’s motion to transfer, arguing that his choice of forum was entitled to greater weight and that the forum selection clause in Facebook’s terms of service was inapplicable to his case, since his complaint was not based on his own use of Facebook but rather on the transmission of unsolicited text messages.
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled in favor of Facebook and granted the motion to transfer. The court ruled that the forum selection clause in Facebook’s terms of service was valid and applied to the facts of this case.
“[Facebook’s terms of service] governs the legal relationship between Defendant [Facebook] and millions of users of its website and related services. Because of this, the forum selection clause contained in [Facebook’s terms of service] has been addressed by numerous courts in actions involving Defendant. The Court cannot identify a single instance where any federal court has struck down [Facebook’s terms of service] as an impermissible contract of adhesion induced by fraud or overreaching or held the forum selection clause now at issue to be otherwise unenforceable due to public policy considerations. [Here, the court cites several other federal district court cases involving Facebook’s forum selection clause.] The Court finds the reasoning of these cases persuasive, declines to depart from the great weight of persuasive authority on this question, and accordingly finds that Plaintiff [Ricky Franklin] has failed to overcome the presumptive validity of the forum selection clause on the basis of fraud, overreaching, or contravention of public policy.”
