Fair, large and liberal

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I’d like to think it is a fitting epitaph, literally and figuratively, for the JC as and when he finally shuffles off this mortal coil.

Look, in our new normal we may never meet each other again, even if we do all live to ripe maturities, so when the great Counterparty in the sky hand-delivers his Section 6(e) notice to this fat old goat, 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 to a gobbet of text — especially an elegant, sparse one — is an entreaty not to be a penis — to not go out of your way to imagine phantoms lurking in its sombre cadence; not wilfully to make out the outline of succubi and incubi in the mundane contiguities of its benign glyphs and serifs; not to freight it an awkward but well-meant subordinate clause with absurd, paranoid, counter-intuitive or point-defeating meanings — temptations which, as we all know, many commercial lawyers find tremendously hard, in their heart of hearts, to resist.

Or it could just mean “pale, overweight and curious”. You have to play the hand you were dealt, folks.

See also

• Ejusdem generis
• Non mentula esse