Fair, large and liberal

The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ Go Premium I told you I was ill Index — Click the ᐅ to expand: Glossary Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

I’d like to think a fitting epitaph, literally and figuratively, for the JC as and when he finally shuffles off this mortal coil. Should anyone care enough to have a whip-round for a tombstone, I’d be good with that.

In the service of statutory and contractual interpretation, the directive that one should afford a fair, large and liberal interpretation of a gobbet of text — especially an elegantly-rendered one — it is an entreaty not to be a penis — to not go out of your way to imagine phantoms emerging from its glyphs and serifs; not to freight it with absurd, paranoid, counter-intuitive and essential point-defeating meanins —something which many commercial lawyers find it tremendously hard, in their heart of hearts, to avoid.