Legal opinion
A document whose author designs to achieve exactly the opposite effect to the one his reader anticipates, in that it carries as little in the way of meaningful existential content as possible, while being comprehensive, categorical and absolute about what it is not saying. Which is, more or less, everything.
Brexit means Brexit
This is typical of the sum total of the positive statement of the law you find in a legal opinion:
- (Subject always to the qualifications, assumptions and caveats set on pages 4-85,) This agreement is valid, binding and enforceable[1] in accordance with its terms.
Which is a lawyer’s way of saying Brexit means Brexit. Should the agreement your solicitor has prepared for you make no sense whatsoever — if it is plainly impossible for an ordinary Englishman to divine the merchants’ commercial consensus no matter how carefully he examines the text — then your opinion does no more than verify that sorry state of affairs.
- ↑ Subject, for the avoidance of doubt, to the qualifications, assumptions and caveats set on pages 4-85