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from the I'll-take-'Grammar-Nazi'-for-$10,000,000-Alex-... dept.
A company that refused to pay its delivery drivers overtime for years has lost its bid to be a cheapskate, to the tune of $10,000,000. The 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals (decision-pdf) interpreted an exception to OT laws with special care to a meaningful but missing comma. Specifically, the phrase existing in the statute is:
"..., packing for shipment or distribution of:"
The company wanted the phrase to be interpreted as:
"..., packing for shipment, or distribution of:"
Without the comma, the activity excluded from coverage is "packing". With the comma present, it would have excluded packing or distribution.
The law as it exists in all its commaless glory:
The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:
(1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 18 2017, @02:44PM (10 children)
- On the other hand, the second half of this very sentence uses the Oxford comma (ok, it's a semicolon) - note that there is a semicolon before the "and" separating items 2 and 3 in the list.
That's part of the drafting rules as well.
Outlining sections. If you use an introductory expression that ends with a colon to lead into subordinate clauses or other text, make certain that each clause reads as a logical and grammatical continuation of the introductory language. In addition, begin each item with an upper- case letter, use a conjunction after the next to the last item, end each item except the last with a semicolon and end the last item with a period.
meanwhile the relevant part on items in an in-sentence list/series says:
Although authorities on punctuation may differ, when drafting Maine law or rules, don’t use a comma between the penultimate and the last item of a series.
The quoted section on overtime law is grammatically correct as per the drafting manual [maine.gov] for Maine legislation.
In the sentence given, commenters vehemently protest that there is no ambiguity. They are split about 50/50 on which way is the only possible way to interpret the sentence. The fact that other people are just as convinced of the alternate interpretation is lost on them: Yes, this sentence really is ambiguous.
Sorry, that just means half are wrong. Maine legislation doesn't use Oxford commas in in-sentence lists. According to the judges' ruling, there were two other lists in that section of law which also lacked the Oxford comma as one would expect.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Saturday March 18 2017, @02:53PM (9 children)
You missed this part:
1) Drafting rules are not laws and have exceptions.
2) There is zero doubt the phrase can be read two ways. You admit this, but strongly favor one reading. Your preference is irrelevant - the law is ambiguous because there are two readings.
3) When the law is ambiguous, the court will look at the purpose of the statute in question:
4) Court found that Drivers' narrow reading furthered the purpose of the statute more than Employers' broad reading.
The decision is solid. You disagree with it, and surely the employer will now hire more comma-adept legislators to fuck the workers harder, but for now, suck it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 18 2017, @03:34PM (8 children)
You missed this part:
But the drivers point out that the drafting manual is not dogmatic on that point. The manual also contains a proviso -- "Be careful if an item in the series is modified" -- and then sets out several examples of how lists with modified or otherwise complex terms should be written to avoid the ambiguity that a missing serial comma would otherwise create.
The proviso doesn't apply here. It's circular reasoning at its finest. Just because the writer of this particular clause might not have been as "careful" as the manual would like (which let us note isn't an actual error of any kind), doesn't mean that one gets to reinterpret the list willy nilly.
2) There is zero doubt the phrase can be read two ways. You admit this, but strongly favor one reading. Your preference is irrelevant - the law is ambiguous because there are two readings.
The phrase can be read in many ways more than just two. But only one way is the right way.
In order for the second interpretation to be right, there has to be two errors: dropping the conjunction before "packing" and adding the comma before "packing". And at that point, when you are allowing interpretations based on two or more errors, you will get more than two possible interpretations.
4) Court found that Drivers' narrow reading furthered the purpose of the statute more than Employers' broad reading.
Another nasty bit of rationalizing.
The decision is solid. You disagree with it, and surely the employer will now hire more comma-adept legislators to fuck the workers harder, but for now, suck it.
Nonsense. I disagree because the ruling is shit. English is a hard language in the first place to write law in. But when parties willfully ignore actual meaning and grammar, it makes the problem impossible. You can't have rule of law when judges interpret writing as they wish.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday March 18 2017, @05:55PM (3 children)
For your interpretation to be correct, there also has to be two errors, because the items should be joined by "and" not "or", as they are in the second part of the statement.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 18 2017, @06:15PM (2 children)
For your interpretation to be correct, there also has to be two errors, because the items should be joined by "and" not "or", as they are in the second part of the statement.
What are you trying to say? The construction looks good to me. Further, "or" is a standard conjunction used just like "and" in these series lists.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Whoever on Saturday March 18 2017, @07:29PM (1 child)
Even if you don't accept my argument about "and", the judges make an interesting point.
If "distribution" is meant to be an item in its own right, to be consistent with the rest of the sentence, it should be "distributing": "packing for shipment or distributing".
Instead, "distribution" matches "shipment", suggesting that "packing for shipment or distribution" should be read as one item in the list and "distribution" is not a separate item.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 19 2017, @05:27AM
Instead, "distribution" matches "shipment", suggesting that "packing for shipment or distribution" should be read as one item in the list and "distribution" is not a separate item.
Distributing also matches all the words ending in the -ing suffix since it too is a noun. It is invalid to assume the sentence is in error due to such a superficial consideration. We need to remember that legislation is typically edited by multiple parties and they need not adhere to artistic style.
Let us keep in mind that there is one interpretation of the sentence which is grammatically correct and a bunch of interpretations which aren't. This ruling reeks of judicial activism since it inserts judicial interpretation into what was a decided case and flips the previous rulings on the basis of a suspicious reinterpretation of grammar to an erroneous one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18 2017, @06:06PM (1 child)
Nonsense. I disagree because the ruling is shit. English is a hard language in the first place to write law in. But when parties willfully ignore actual meaning and grammar, it makes the problem impossible. You can't have rule of law when judges interpret writing as they wish.
Fuckin' A, right, Khallow!
Those librul assholes need a lesson to be taught, preferably with a baseball bat or a Nitro Express!
Failing that, since the real 'murikkkans are in charge now, we should just blow up the Library of Congress and be rid of every last one of those job-killing regulations once and for all!
The job creators are being strangled by lubrul judges and rafts of useless regulations. We just need to get rid of the evil [wikipedia.org] pinko [wikipedia.org] fuckhead [wikipedia.org] laws that keep us from Making 'Murikkka Great Again™!
Once we've put that right, we can get rid of the spics, the niggers, the jews and especially those terr'ist raghead sand niggers!
Then we make sure the rest of those waste of breath poor people know their place!
Amirite? You know I am!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 18 2017, @06:18PM
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday March 19 2017, @02:22PM (1 child)
If it can be read many ways, it is ambiguous. That is what ambiguous means. The rest is argument, not fact.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:23PM
If it can be read many ways, it is ambiguous.
Again, that is a circular argument. You can choose to read it a different way, by making unwarranted assumptions about errors of grammar and such. And when you do choose to read it in an ambiguous way, it turns out to be ambiguous.
We've seen the outcome of such games before (a well-known example being the Second Amendment of the US Constitution which has a phrase that is popularly misinterpreted). The judge interprets the law as they see fit, invariably in accordance with their biases. The whole point of written law is to prevent people, including judges, from making up rules on the fly.
The start of any interpretation of a statute or legislation should be the actual writing. Here, the Maine legislature uses a particular grammar for in-sentence series/lists. The sentence is without error when one considers that standard and the normal interpretation (which had already passed two previous rulings). When one ambiguously interprets the sentence in any other way, it is in error. That demonstrates the ambiguity is imaginary. Just because you can choose to read the sentence in some non-standard way doesn't make that way legally valid.