This page is intentionally left blank

It is a founding premise of legal inquiry that one does not waste words: a party who has taken the trouble to insert them, must have meant something by them.

Counter-examples are legion, of course, but of all the inane things a legal eagle can commit to a page – one hopes readers of this site by now will be persuaded there are many – none is quite so pointless as this:

“This page is intentionally left blank”.

Beyond dispensing with the imaginative contention that there might be writing on it that you just can’t see, it is hard to see what this achieves.

We resort to guessing.

Does it differentiate a wantonly blank page, perhaps, from one whose lack of content arose from a weaker mental conviction? Might the author have been merely reckless or negligent? or could it have been blameless inadvertence, the redundant page being overlooked through no cognitive operation, actual or constructive, on the author’s part at all?

Agonising over the writer’s mens rea obscures the real question: WHO CARES? What difference does it make why a page is blank? It is blank: that is an existential fact.

Like the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there, the semantic content of an empty page is precisely nothing. It is neither action not omission, but a formless void; inert; lacking the divine breath of a creator. It is neither alpha nor omega, nor anything between.

Even now I can hear a diligent student piping up from the back: “But, why, can’t you see? It is an omission. It is the failure to say something. A merchant can infringe another’s rights by perfidious omission just as well as she can by malfeasant action.”

Just so. But even then it will take more than a sheet of blank paper to do for her. An unmarked sheet, of itself, is no dog that fails to bark in the night time. It conveys no premise, and without one of those, permits no conclusion of any type or kind. An omission to say this or that cannot be imprisoned within the margins of an empty page: it is universal: it inhabits every page, however densely entexted, on which the thing wasn’t said; in every breath of air on which the utterance did not pass.

So however you wish to construe it, be in no doubt, dear reader: the page is joyously, wilfully, defiantly, and with the publisher’s unequivocal endorsement, blank.

Except - and it brings no pleasure to point this out, but here goes - since someone dolloped that whopping great wodge of italicised, square-bracketed text right in the middle of it, it isn’t blank.

Which brings us to a fine old pickle. We seem to have hit a patch of legal quantum indeterminacy. If one can only be certain a page is meant to be blank by writing on it, can we ever be sure of anything ever again? What would Descartes think? He would need at least to think about it. Scribo “non”, ergo non scribo, he might conclude.

Q: How do you confuse a ditch-digger? A: Give him three shovels, and tell him to take his pick.

Q: how do you confuse a mediocre lawyer A: give him a blank sheet of paper and write “this page has been intentionally left blank” on it.

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