Thanks to a tip from Glenn West, I heard of the decision of the Florida District Court of Appeal in Treasure Coast Classical Academy, Inc. v. Optima Foundation, Inc., No. 4D2025-1577, 2026 WL 2104076 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. July 22, 2026). Today, The Volokh Conspiracy published my article about it, Comma Mischief from the Florida District Court of Appeal. Because The … Read More
Friends, today is a special day, as I’m able to introduce to you a new kind of syntactic ambiguity. (A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting says, “Syntactic ambiguity arises principally out of the order in which words and phrases appear and how they relate to each other grammatically.” But here’s my updated version: “Syntactic ambiguity arises when you have … Read More
As I mentioned in this blog post, I’ve been leafing through some textbooks intended for teaching contract drafting. One of them is Tina L. Stark & Monica L. Llorente, Drafting Contracts: How and Why Lawyers Do What They Do (3d ed 2024). I happened to notice two technical mistakes in that textbook relating to principles of English usage. I thought … Read More
I’ve just scheduled the next public Drafting Clearer Contracts presentation. It’s on 28 and 29 October 2026, from 11:00 a.m. to 2:10 p.m. ET. Go here for more information. I hope to see some of you there!
For an article I have to write in the next few days, I’ve been leafing through textbooks intended to be used in teaching contract drafting. I had contemplated doing reviews of one or more textbooks, but I decided I’d rather focus on how I’d approach teaching contract drafting. That’s what the new article will be about. But I noticed that … Read More
Last week Contracting Excellence Journal, a journal of World Commerce & Contracting, published my article Copy-and-Paste Contract Drafting Can Dull Your Wits or Leave You Demoralized. We Can Do Better! This article features one thought I haven’t articulated previously: That it’s demoralizing to be a copy-and-paste monkey!
A few days every month, I prepare videos for Drafting Clearer Contracts: On Demand, my library of videos and automated quizzes. To do that, I revisit what MSCD has to say about a given topic. Sometimes, that prompts me to rethink how I’ve approached a given issue. That’s what happened yesterday, when I revisited the discussion of day and date … Read More
Crazy things are afoot in the categories of contract language. In addition to my considering creating “language of state of mind” (see this post), I’m now considering creating another new category: “language of inaction.” Consider the following sentences: In the current regime, they fall under “language of policy.” Language of policy is for stating ground rules of the contract—stuff that … Read More
OK, let’s go back to basics. I noticed this passage (footnotes omitted) in the textbook Stephen L. Sepinuck & John F. Hilson, Transactional Skills: How to Structure and Document a Deal 15 (3d ed. 2022): Notice that the discussion above refers to the written document as an “agreement,” not as a “contract.” While you might encounter documents labeled as a … Read More
The next public series of Drafting Clearer Contracts: Masterclass, series (52), starts on 29 September 2026. Go here for more information. I apologize for being slow to get it scheduled—I’ve had plenty of distractions these past three months! I keep doing Masterclass because people keep telling me they find it valuable. Masterclass participants, I invite you to tell us, on … Read More
