Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Just insert the word "not"

There's a scene in Act II of Sir W.S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan's delightful Iolanthe where the Lord Chancellor resolves a tricky problem of interpretation by the convenient step of inserting the word "doesn't."* It turns out that legislators in Nevada have had the same idea, as witness this article about how that state's military personnel lost the right to turn down non-judicial punishment. Contrary to the article, however, Nevada is not the only state that has revoked that time-honored right: Indiana just did it

* "Allow me, as an old Equity draftsman, to make a suggestion. The subtleties of the legal mind are equal to the emergency. The thing is really quite simple--the insertion of a single word will do it. Let it stand that every fairy shall die who doesn't marry a mortal, and there you are, out of your difficulty at once!"

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