In this recent post I discussed my overuse of any. I’d now like to suggest one possible reason for overuse of any. Consider the following: a tax imposed by a government authority a tax imposed by any government authority I suspect that some drafters think that using any in the second example would ensure that the provision couldn’t be read … Read More
On December 1, 2007, AVAX Technologies and one Francois Martelet entered into an employment agreement providing for Martelet to serve as AVAX’s CEO. It all ended in litigation, and recently the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania issued this opinion. The only part that caught my eye involved the following provision: Discretionary Performance Bonus. Employee shall be entitled to … Read More
Reader Patrick Grant told me about a ConstructionRisk.com newsletter describing a Texas case involving syntactic ambiguity. (Syntactic ambiguity derives from uncertainty over which part of a sentence a given word or phrase modifies.) The case in question was Consolidated Reinforcement v. Carothers Executive Homes, 271 S.W.3d 887 (Tex. App. 2008), a case before the Texas Court of Appeals, Third District. … Read More
