Ambiguity

During my blogging-in-my-bathrobe years, I entertained myself by trawling on Westlaw for court opinions dealing with confusing contract language. Good times. In a fit of nostalgia, this evening I went back to Westlaw and entered a search, saying to myself, Yes, I can still do this! But I’d obviously lost my touch, because I forgot to limit my search to recent … Read More

Here’s something I tweeted today: Pop songs are nice, but if you want to enforce promises, put them in a contract! pic.twitter.com/7jW8SgoI8t — Ken Adams (@AdamsDrafting) October 29, 2017 And here’s the tweet that followed it: Some saying should be "or", but song DOESN'T USE A CONJUNCTION! Invitation to a fight! I should have used "do one or more of … Read More

I noticed this post on ContractsProf Blog. It involves a fight over what “the fee” meant in a contract. Did it mean this fee or that fee? Ah, says I, that’s an instance of antecedent ambiguity. That’s where you allude to something mentioned elsewhere in a contract, but it’s arguably unclear what you’re actually referring to. See this post and … Read More

Have we had enough of syntactic ambiguity yet? Aside from my many posts about syntactic ambiguity over the years, recent weeks have brought us the Maine serial-comma case (here) and the Georgia campus-carry bill (here). Now, thanks to this post on ContractsProf Blog I learned about BL Partners Group, L.P. v. Interbroad, LLC, No. 465 EDA 2016, 2017 WL 2591473 … Read More

Thanks to Steven Sholk, I learned of an article by Ira P. Robbins, professor at American University’s Washington College of Law. The article is entitled “And/Or” and the Proper Use of Legal Language, and it will be published in the Maryland Law Review. (The SSRN page for the article is here.) Professor Robbins’s view is a contrarian one—that we should … Read More

Go here for a clip run on WABE 90.1 FM, the Atlanta public radio station, and the related article. They’re about lines 37 and 38 of Georgia’s HB 280, a bill that would allow guns on campus at Georgia’s public colleges and universities. You hear me for a big ten seconds. Here’s the language at issue: Not apply to faculty, staff, … Read More

Yesterday I did this post about the recent First Circuit opinion in which lack of a serial (or Oxford) comma featured prominently. That opinion prompted no end of articles in the established media (including this article in the New York Times) and no end of chatter on social media. And many of my readers rushed to tell me about it. … Read More

In an opinion issued this week, O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, No. 16-1901, 2017 WL 957195 (1st Cir. Mar. 13, 2017) (PDF here), the First Circuit considered the meaning of the following: The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: Did “packing for shipment or distribution” refer to two kinds of packing, or did it … Read More