Month: October 2010

Lexical ambiguity arises when the context is insufficient to allow readers to determine the sense of a word that has more than one meaning. You’d think that to avoid lexical ambiguity, all that a drafter has to do is ensure that reasonable readers couldn’t find alternative meanings in a given word. But for two reasons, that’s not enough. For one … Read More

In a contract he drafted for an assignment, one of my Penn Law students used the word aggressively. I immediately turned to EDGAR, where I found 106 “material contracts” filed in the past year that contain aggressive or aggressively. Here’s an example (emphasis added): Distributor shall aggressively distribute and encourage the utilization of merchandising aids and promotional materials provided at … Read More