Free North Dakota Liability Waiver Form

North Dakota law starts from a short statutory list rather than from a judge-made test. Section 9-08-02 of the Century Code says which contracts are against the policy of the law: those aimed at exempting someone from responsibility for that person's own fraud, for willful injury to the person or property of another, or for violation of law. Ordinary negligence is missing from the list, and that absence is the reason a properly written participant waiver works in this state. The Supreme Court has enforced one for a road race and one for an after-school programme, and both times decided the case on summary judgment by reading the document.

The pages below walk through those two decisions, the statutes that govern how a release is read, what happens when a parent signs for a child, the unusually long window a North Dakota claimant has to sue, and the electronic signature chapter. Everything here is general information about North Dakota law and is not legal advice for your business, so run your finished form past a lawyer licensed here before you hand it to anyone.

How North Dakota treats liability waivers

Reed v. University of North Dakota, decided in 1999, is where the rule is stated. A university hockey player ran a charity road race as part of preseason conditioning, collapsed from dehydration, and sued the race sponsor for failing to supply enough water stations and medical staff. He had signed a registration form saying he entered at his own risk, assumed all responsibility for injuries incurred as a direct or indirect result of his participation, and agreed not to hold the participating sponsors responsible for any claims. The court framed the law in one breath: generally the law does not favour contracts exonerating parties from liability for their own conduct, such clauses are strictly construed against the party who benefits from them and will not be enforced if ambiguous, yet the parties are bound by clear and unambiguous language showing an intent to extinguish liability.

Reed then worked through the runner's objections one at a time. Consideration was present because he gave up a legal right in exchange for being allowed on the course. The phrase participating sponsors was not ambiguous, since the registration form identified the sponsor as the contact for race information. Severe dehydration complications and the emergency care that followed fell within the plain meaning of what he had accepted, and reading the release any other way would have left it meaningless. He also argued the release offended public policy because he had no power to negotiate it, and the court weighed the two factors it borrowed for that purpose, disparity of bargaining power and whether the service is a public or essential one, and found that any compulsion came from his hockey programme rather than from the race sponsor.

Kondrad ex rel. McPhail v. Bismarck Park District followed in 2003 and restated Reed without qualifying it. Both cases were resolved on summary judgment, because whether a written contract is ambiguous is a question of law and section 9-07-04 directs the court to find the parties' intention from the writing alone when it can. For a North Dakota business that is the practical headline: your release will most likely be judged by a judge reading your page, not by a jury hearing your staff.

Waivers signed for minors in North Dakota

Kondrad is the case every North Dakota operator with young customers should know, and it is easy to overstate. Shari McPhail enrolled her son Scott in BLAST, an after-school care programme run by the Bismarck Park District, and signed a Parent Agreement. Scott was injured riding a bicycle that belonged to a child outside the programme, on school grounds, during BLAST hours. The park district conceded that bicycle riding was not an activity associated with the programme, and Scott's side argued the release therefore did not reach the accident.

The court disagreed on the reading. It separated the two sentences in the form: the assumption of risk sentence, tied to injuries sustained in activities associated with the programme, and the waiver and release sentence, which relinquished all claims for injuries arising on account of the child's participation in the programme. The second sentence, it held, was not cut down by the first. Because the accident undisputedly happened while Scott was participating in BLAST, the release exonerated the district for its alleged negligent supervision, and summary judgment stood.

So a parent's signature did defeat a child's claim in North Dakota. What the opinion does not contain is any discussion of whether a parent has authority to give up a child's cause of action. That question was never presented, so it has never been reasoned through here, and no other North Dakota decision was located that answers it. Say so plainly to yourself before relying on it, particularly since Kondrad involved a public park district rather than a commercial operator, a distinction some other states treat as decisive.

Two statutes fill in the rest. Minors are people under eighteen under section 14-10-01, and section 14-10-11 lets a minor disaffirm his own contract personally before majority or within one year afterwards, which is why a form signed only by a fifteen-year-old gives you nothing. After an injury, a child sues through a guardian ad litem under section 14-10-04, and money recovered for a child is managed through a conservatorship under chapter 30.1-29, where section 30.1-29-24 gives the conservator power to settle a claim by compromise. North Dakota also has an unusual pair of settlement statutes: under sections 9-08-08 and 9-08-09 any personal injury settlement made within thirty days of the injury, or while the injured person is still disabled by it and within six months, is voidable by written notice, and simply filing suit avoids it.

What the waiver must say to hold up in North Dakota

There is no North Dakota statute demanding capital letters, bold type or a separate initials box on a release, and no case that turns on typography. The discipline comes from the interpretation chapter instead. Section 9-07-02 makes clear and explicit language govern, section 9-07-04 confines the search for intent to the writing where possible, and section 9-07-19 interprets any uncertainty that survives the other rules most strongly against the party who caused it, with the promisor presumed to be that party. Stack those on top of the rule that an exculpatory clause is strictly construed against the party it benefits and the drafting instructions almost write themselves.

Give the release its own sentence and its own scope, and do not let it borrow limits from a neighbouring clause. Kondrad rewarded a form whose waiver sentence stood on its own and swept wider than the assumption of risk sentence beside it, and the same analysis would have punished the district if the drafting had run the other way. Name the business, its officers, employees, volunteers and agents, and describe the claims being given up, including claims arising from the negligence of the released parties. Tie the release to one identified activity or event; Reed made a point of the fact that the release covered a single race, and contrasted decisions elsewhere refusing releases written to cover an entire season.

Then describe the real risks of what you run, in your own words, so that an injury later cannot be characterised as something nobody contemplated. Reed accepted dehydration and the medical response to it as within the plain meaning of the risks the runner assumed, partly because the runner conceded he knew running carried some of those risks. The more concretely your form names the hazards, the harder that argument is to make.

Gross negligence and what a North Dakota waiver cannot cover

Section 9-08-02 sets the ceiling, and both leading cases point at it in a footnote rather than in the body, because in each one the plaintiff had pleaded only negligence. No release in this state can exempt a business from responsibility for its own fraud, for willful injury to the person or property of another, or for violation of law whether willful or negligent. Footnote 1 of Kondrad puts it bluntly: under section 9-08-02 a party is precluded from contractually exonerating itself from liability for willful acts.

Footnote 4 of Reed explains the machinery, and it is the most useful paragraph in North Dakota waiver law. Contracts are construed in light of existing statutes, which become part of them and are read in as if they had been written into the document. The interpretation of a release is therefore governed by section 9-08-02, and exoneration drafted as any claims and all responsibility is limited to negligent acts as a matter of law. An overbroad North Dakota release is trimmed, not destroyed, which is a gentler outcome than a business would get in several neighbouring states.

That does not make overbreadth free. Reed also recites, from the authority it adopted, that exculpatory clauses will not be enforced where they purport to release intentional, willful or wanton acts, and no North Dakota decision found in this research defines gross negligence for release purposes or says whether a release may reach recklessness. The honest answer is that the line between negligence and something worse has not been drawn here. Write the exclusion into the form, add a severability clause so a ruling on one sentence does not take the rest with it, and treat the release as one layer under trained staff, documented procedures and insurance.

Electronic signatures in North Dakota

Chapter 9-16 of the Century Code is North Dakota's Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, and it applies to records and signatures created after the end of July 2001. Section 9-16-06 does the heavy lifting: a record or signature may not be denied legal effect or enforceability solely because it is electronic, a contract may not be denied effect because an electronic record was used to form it, an electronic record satisfies a law requiring a writing, and an electronic signature satisfies a law requiring a signature.

Three neighbouring sections matter to how you build the flow. Section 9-16-04 applies the chapter only between parties who have each agreed to transact by electronic means, and that agreement is drawn from the context and surrounding circumstances including the parties' conduct, so make the choice to sign electronically a visible step rather than an assumption. Section 9-16-08 attributes an electronic record or signature to a person if it was the act of that person, provable in any manner, including by showing the efficacy of whatever security procedure you used to identify the signer. Section 9-16-11 lets an electronic record satisfy a retention requirement when it accurately reflects the record in its final form and stays accessible for later reference, and section 9-16-12 forbids excluding a record from evidence merely because it is electronic.

Note the boundary in section 9-16-02(5): a transaction covered by the chapter remains subject to other substantive law. Going electronic never loosens the section 9-08-02 limit or the strict construction rule. It only removes any argument that a screen signature is not a signature.

How to use this form in North Dakota

Download the Word version of the waiver and work through the bracketed placeholders: your legal business name, the activity, the location, and North Dakota with your county in the governing law line. Keep the release sentence where it sits, as its own clause with its own scope, and resist the urge to merge it into the assumption of risk paragraph. Rewrite the risk list so it names the hazards your customers actually face, whether that is horses, ice, altitude on a lift, farm equipment or a climbing wall. Include the sentence excluding fraud, willful injury and violation of law, keep the severability clause, and delete the note addressed to the business before you publish anything.

Then check what your activity adds on top. A ski area gets nothing from the Skiing Responsibility Act until it conspicuously posts the warning language in section 53-09-11. An agritourism operation must register with the division of tourism and both post and contractually repeat the notice in section 53-13-04. An equine operation is protected by chapter 53-10 without any statutory sign, but posting a warning about latent land conditions closes one of the statute's exceptions. An amusement ride cannot legally run until the inspection and insurance affidavit is on file with the city or county. None of those obligations is satisfied by the waiver.

To collect signatures online instead, rebuild the same document as a Waiver.com template: each block of text in order, the release as its own clearly headed block, participant and guardian fields, and a published version. Every signature is then stamped to a specific version of the wording, which is what you will want in hand years later, because North Dakota gives an injured adult six years to sue under section 28-01-16(5) and keeps a child's claim alive until roughly a year past the eighteenth birthday under section 28-01-25. Have a North Dakota lawyer read the final wording before you use it.