The $10 Million comma

[underpants]

The $10 million comma
In this class action lawsuit, drivers for Oakhurst Dairy sued the company over its failure to grant them overtime pay. According to Maine law, workers are entitled to 1.5 times their normal pay for any hours worked over 40 per week. However, there are exemptions to this rule. Specifically, companies don’t need to pay overtime for the following activities:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

Agricultural produce;
Meat and fish product; and
Perishable foods
Note the end of the opening line, where there is no comma before the “or.”

Oakhurst Dairy argued its drivers did not qualify for overtime because they engage in distribution, and the spirit of the law intended to list “packing for shipment” and “distribution” as two separate exempt activities.

However, the drivers argued the letter of the law said no such thing. Without that telltale Oxford comma, the law could be read to exclude only packing — whether it was packing for shipment or packing for distribution. Distribution by itself, in this case, would not be exempt.

Without that comma, as the judge maintained, this distinction was not clearcut:

Specifically, if that exemption used a serial comma to mark off the last of the activities that it lists, then the exemption would clearly encompass an activity that the drivers perform. And, in that event, the drivers would plainly fall within the exemption and thus outside the overtime law’s protection. But, as it happens, there is no serial comma to be found in the exemption’s list of activities, thus leading to this dispute over whether the drivers fall within the exemption from the overtime law or not.

As a result, the court found in favor of the drivers, costing the dairy an estimated $10 million.

https://thewritelife.com/is-the-oxford-comma-necessary/

[Beakybird]

1. I bet those dairy owners were commatose!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

2. Yep. Those who leave off that last comma

are almost always making a huge mistake.

Don't if it's apocryphal, but I've read somewhere that a will read something like: I leave all of my estate in equal shares to my three sons, Tom, Dick and Harry. Tom supposedly successfully argued that Dick and Harry were together to get 50% and he'd get the other 50%.

In my time as a paralegal I noticed that attorneys almost never use the Oxford comma. You'd think that they, or all people, would understand the implications of it.

[TomSlick]

4. This lawyer does.

Clarity is everything - except when obfuscation is the goal.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

5. Good!

When I was a paralegal I was driven bat-shit crazy by the lack of the Oxford comma, and of course had no authority to persuade the attorneys to use it.

Do you need a paralegal?

[TomSlick]

6. My paralegal and I have been together for nearly 30 years.

She doesn't agree with my use of the Oxford comma but we do it my way.

[Yonnie3]

3. This was an example used in a business law review class I took.

There were about a dozen examples about clarity in documents. This is the only one I recall.