Shall
19 October 2007
Many legal-writing authorities, most notably Bryan Garner, recommend eliminating use of the word shall in legal drafting, due to the word’s overuse and potential ambiguity.1 Ken Adams disagrees. While he acknowledges that shall is overused, he thinks the better solution is more disciplined use of the word. He outlines his views in a recent article for the New York Law Journal. You can read the article in PDF or (at least for now) in HTML.
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1 Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage 939–41 (2d ed. 1995).