What I haven't seen discussed anywhere is whether the judge is
standing on formality and insisting on correct written English, or
whether the legal meaning of the phrase is significantly changed by
the semicolon to the point that if the judge acted on it there
would be legal problems.
It seems to me that there are punctuation and grammar errors in a
lot of legal documents (especially in contracts, where I see them
all the time, but maybe contract law is different); on the other
hand, there are certainly plenty of situations where replacing "or"
with a semicolon drastically changes the meaning.
I can't tell, even looking at the phrase in question, whether the
situation at hand is a case of "the meaning is obvious to everyone
involved, but the judge is being a stickler for correctness," or
whether it's more like "if the judge acted on it as written, it
would be a much broader order than is legally reasonable."
Anyone know for sure?
Comment statistics for Jed Hartman on the Electrolite blog
The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Jed Hartman:
Show all comments by Jed Hartman.