Comment by torstenvl
2 years ago
Agreed. Their analysis inappropriately conflates the syntactical subject of a sentence with the semantic agent of the sentence.
It also violates the fundamental rule that changing a sentence into the passive voice does not effect a semantic change.
"The employee shall be reimbursed [by the employer] for all expenses." must necessarily mean the same as "The employer shall reimburse the employee for all expenses."
I think that in the first (ambiguous) phrasing there is an implicit (common-sense?) understanding of: the employee shall be reimbursed for all expenses if the employee asks for it or wants it, ie the employee has the right to ask for and only then the employer has the obligation to reimburse all expenses.
No, there is no reason to appeal to "common sense." It is the plain and unambiguous meaning of the text itself.
I think you may have been reading too many IETF documents.
Legal text doesn't come with a list of definitions that attempt to lock e.g. "shall" down in stone.
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