I don’t really mind the law people having some sort of “disjunctive and”, but…

1.02: “‘And’ may be read ‘or,’ and ‘or’ may be read ‘and’ if the sense requires it.”
926.01: “Notwithstanding section 1.02 of the Revised Code, ‘and’ shall not be read ‘or’ and ‘or’ shall not be read ‘and.’”

This straightforward contradiction? How can anyone tolerate this?Report

Not sure whether it’s logic, but there’s all sorts of interesting cases about, e.g., whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable (for taxation purposes). Botanically, a tomato’s a fruit, but it’s treated like a vegetable. See Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304. Similar cases as to whether a G.I. Joe action figure is a doll.

Scalia and Garner’s, *Reading the Law* is awesome to read more about this stuff. Other “logic” sort of bits include doctrines like noscitur a sociis (i.e., unclear words find their meaning from other nearby terms) or ejusdem generis (i.e., vague terms are clarified by looking at their exemplars). Say a school had a sign: “No weapons allowed (e.g., handguns, machine guns, assault rifles)”, and a kid shows up with a knife. Did he violate the rule–the parenthetical “narrows” the application of ‘weapon’ or no? Etc.Report

1. “Or” read as “and” is not the same as what is referred to as the “inclusive or.”
2. The disjunctive “and” is an interesting feature of many Germanic languages (like English), but the conjunction in “Acme may sell assets and make capital expenditures” is not really an example because that sentence is just ambiguous in the scope of its modal qualifier (“Acme may sell assets, and Acme may make capital expenditures” does not mean that Acme has the option of doing both of these things, just that it has both options).
3. Sentences like “All fish and whales are aquatic” are often given as examples, because making the quantifier scope explicit reveals a subsentential “or”: “Show me anything, and if it’s either a fish or a whale, then it’s aquatic.” But this is really just a matter of ambiguous scope again, because the sentence is synonymous with “All fish are aquatic, and all whales are aquatic.” A related example is the sentence “We can’t have folks gambling and drinking on school grounds,” in which the conjunction is operating in dual fashion to the one in “We can’t have folks taking exams and consulting textbooks on school grounds.” Here the ambiguity is about whether you are conjoining two negations or negating a single conjunction.
4. But a proper disjunctive “and” is found in the sentence “Our Hungarian neighbors are always drinking schnapps and tea.” Here the conjunction does not convey that the neighbors are always drinking schnapps and also always drinking tea. They may seldom mix the two and have some sort of regular schedule about it, but they are always drinking one or the other.
5. Properly conjunctive uses of “or” are much rarer. Typical suggested examples are constructions dual to those in 2 and 3, so that the fact that the “or” has a conjunctive force is revealed upon scope disambiguation.

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