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2 Legal Writing: J. Legal Writing Inst. 81 (1996)
Doctrine of the Last Antecedent: The Mystifying Morass of Ambiguous Modifiers

handle is hein.journals/jlwriins2 and id is 87 raw text is: Doctrine of the Last Antecedent: The Mystifying Morass of Ambiguous Modifiers Terri LeClercq* I. INTRODUCTION Students enter law school to learn the law, not to learn to write - or so many of them believe. They have yet to appreciate that law is language and, therefore, for law to be clear, the lan- guage of the law must be clear. Even those who seem to appreciate the law/language connection often do not see, until an instructor points it out, how difficult it can be to achieve clarity using the multifaceted English language. It is important, therefore, for legal writing faculty to offer their students a glimpse into the legal com- plications' that sentence structure can create. Consider the following example: A probationary police officer walks into an attorney's office, believing that he has been unfairly passed over for promotion. He had gained some weight while under the stress of taking and passing the three tests required for promo- tion to police officer. Instead of receiving the promotion he be- lieved he deserved, however, he was turned down by a committee that said he failed to meet one of the four requirements for promotion: To qualify for police officer, the candidate must be within the weight range for his/her height, score 85 on the first test bat- tery, score 90 on the special placement battery, and achieve an 85% accuracy score on the shooting range WITHIN SIX WEEKS OF HIRING. Although the police rookie's weight was within the weight range when he applied for officer, he now weighs too much. Does * Terri LeClercq has a Ph.D. in English and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. She has written Guide to Legal Writing Style and Expert Legal Writing, plus nu- merous articles. I Students may be unaware of the impact of statutory interpretation on our court sys- tem. In the first four months of 1995, for example, the United States Supreme Court issued seventeen decisions: 14 involved statutory interpretation; the other five dealt with criminal law and procedure. See William Banks, At the Halfway Point, 81 A.B.A. J. 50 (1995).

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