Law: Punctuation

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Before a Congressional Commission investigating land grants to the Northern Pacific R. R., one D. F. McGowan, attorney for the Forestry Service, declared that a comma in legal writing may mean as much money as a cipher on the left side of a decimal point.

Specifically, his point was that the omission of a comma in a long sentence in the Land Grant Act of 1870 enabled the Northern Pacific R. R. Co. to withhold land from settlers longer than had been intended by Congress. To support his argument, Mr. McGowan produced a letter giving a grammatical analysis of the disputed sentence, signed by Tucker Brooke (ex-Rhodes Scholar and Editor of The American Oxonian), Secretary of the English Department at Yale, and Prof. George H. Nettleton, Chairman of the Department.

Mr. McGowan also read a Supreme Court decision to the effect that Congress was presumed to know the rules of grammar. This inspired Chairman Sinnott to remark (not for the record) : "We ought to give this Judge a raise in salary."

Some time ago, in a learned article on legal punctuation, Urban A. Lavery wrote in the American Bar Association Journal:

"Indeed, as a breeder of litigation, commas may be compared to the countless wigglers that in our youth we watched coming up to breathe in the family rainbarrel. To carry the simile one step further, it [the comma] should be abolished."

Some years ago, the Missouri Supreme Court reversed conviction because an indictment omitted the word "the."