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I'm going to use this conversation as a teaching example in my law-school contract drafting course. (In contract disputes, the parties' lawyers will often look
by dctoedt 9y ago
I'm going to use this conversation as a teaching example in my law-school contract drafting course.
(In contract disputes, the parties' lawyers will often look for exploitable "security holes" of this kind, i.e., places where the contract's language can plausibly be interpreted in multiple ways and the choice of interpretation affects the outcome of the dispute. A big part of the job of contract drafters and reviewers is to try to spot and eliminate such weaknesses before the contract is signed, but that doesn't always happen.)
- jnordwick 9y agoI did some work one time for a patent attorney. When he was teaching me how to draft patents, I being on the minimalist side would always balk at repetition - such a long lists of items that are especially synonymous or things already stated elsewhere. He agreed that they were kind of dumb and repetitious but the purpose was to have it on multiple places in case it was vague (or too specific!) in any single description. It annoyed me to no end. Also the recent Maine dispute over the oxford comma kind of made me understand that better.
- dctoedt 9y ago> long lists of items I came up as a patent attorney; I always found it useful to create defined terms and use them (in initial caps) as needed, in the same vein as defining a variable in software.