CAN a driver exempt himself from liability for injuring an infant passenger? This was the question raised in Buckpitt v. Oates.1 The plaintiff, who was seventeen years old, persuaded the defendant, who was a friend of the same age, to give him a lift in the defendant's car by promising to pay for the petrol. Before the journey began the plaintiff read, and understood, a notice in the car which said: " Warning. Passengers ride in this vehicle at their own risk. Neither the owner nor the driver will be liable for loss of life or personal injury or other loss or damage howsoever caused. Passengers are not covered by insurance." The plaintiff was injured when the defendant negligently crashed into a wall, and he brought an action for damages. The case came before John Stephenson J., who held that the plaintiff was bound by the notice. Although in his view the plaintiff's infancy would have saved him from being bound by the notice had it been part of a contract of carriage between the parties,2 he could find no contract in this case; and instead he concluded that the notice had made the plaintiff volens as to the defendant's negligence, because infancy was no bar to volenti non fit injuria and the plaintiff had here appreciated and accepted the risk.3 Accordingly he found for the defendant. This decision is open to question on a number of grounds: (1) It seems strange that an infant cannot be volens if he contracts not to sue in respect of injury, but will be so if he merely agrees, without contracting, not to sue. The judge's view would mean that the more a person wants to be bound, the less he will be so. It is certainly true that an infant has no capacity to make a contract not to sue in respect of injury 4: if, as the judge seems to have assumed,5 it follows from this that a contract cannot make an infant volens, then a fortiori an agreement falling short of a