Drafting contract clauses / Vertragsklauseln entwerfen

Corp Law Blog discusses the design of contract clauses. The trigger was an entry in Professor Bainbridge’s blog. This is the kind of thing discussed:

bq. The real lesson is, of course, to:
a) think,
b) draft and
c) speak
in clearly identified clauses.

Incidentally, my German students had difficulty understanding something slightly different, which Germans don’t do: parallel structures after either/or etc. (I add the divisions only as an aid to understanding – there should be no ‘(a)’ and so on).

We will go either on a) Friday,
b) Saturday, or
c) Sunday.

We will either a) go on Friday,
b) go on Saturday, or
c) go on Sunday.

That’s to say, the structure after the either/or is like the bits in the brackets in algebra.

Meanwhile, a number of books have hit the German market on how to draft contracts. And the latest edition of the German law students’ periodical justament has an article on Vertragsgestaltung (drafting contracts). Here’s a review of Wolfgang Däubler’s recent Verhandeln und Gestalten.

Can anyone tell me why I can’t write a c between two brackets/parentheses without it being converted into a copyright sign (c)? I will just have to leave one bracket away. I know how to switch that off in Microsoft Word, but is this html or Movable Type?
LATER NOTE: have removed one bracket as the MT-Textile plugin was converting my c’s to (c)’s.

5 thoughts on “Drafting contract clauses / Vertragsklauseln entwerfen

  1. Can’t tell you which. You can either
    a) use a single right bracket, which looks better anyway, or
    b) tear your hair . . . :-)
    Go with the workaround.

  2. Are you using the SmartyPants plugin, or something similar? At any rate, (c) has become © and thus © in your entries :)

  3. @Bob: Thanks very much – I’ve done that. Can’t afford to tear my hair nowadays.
    @Ingmar: you’re absolutely right, that was a good thought. It was MT-Textile, although I’ve got Smarty Pants too. I couldn’t work out how to exclude this behaviour, so I decided to change the number of brackets. I only had two because I was quoting a site that used two.

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