Language, Interpretation and Legal Obligation. The different weight of 4 words

What's the only word that means mandatory? Here's what law and policy say about "shall, will, may and must."

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We call "must" and "must not" words of obligation. "Must" is the only word that imposes a legal obligation on your readers to tell them something is mandatory. Also, "must not" are the only words you can use to say something is prohibited. Who says so and why?

Nearly every jurisdiction has held that the word "shall" is confusing because it can also mean "may, will or must." Legal reference books like the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure no longer use the word "shall." Even the Supreme Court ruled that when the word "shall" appears in statutes, it means "may."

Bryan Garner, the legal writing scholar and editor of Black's Law Dictionary wrote that "In most legal instruments, shall violates the presumption of consistency…which is why shall is among the most heavily litigated words in the English language."

Those are some of the reasons why these documents compel us to use the word "must" when we mean "mandatory:"

• The Federal Register Document Drafting Handbook (Section 3) states "Use ‘must’ instead of ‘shall’ to impose a legal obligation on your reader."
• The Federal Plain Language Guidelines (page 25) (PDF) referred to in the Federal Plain Writing Act of 2010, compel the FAA and every federal department to "use ‘must,’ not ‘shall’" to indicate requirements.
• FAA Plain Language Writing Order 1000.36, (page 4) (PDF) says avoid the word "shall" and use "must" to impose requirements, including contracts.

Until recently, law schools taught attorneys that "shall" means "must." That's why many attorneys and executives think "shall" means "must." It's not their fault. The Federal Plain Writing Act and the Federal Plain Language Guidelines only appeared in 2010. And the fact is, even though "must" has come to be the only clear, valid way to express "mandatory," most parts of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFRs) that govern federal departments still use the word "shall" for that purpose.

With time, laws evolve to reflect new knowledge and standards. During this transition, "must" remains the safe, enlightened choice not only because it imposes clarity on the concept of obligation, but also because it does not contradict any instance of "shall" in the CFRs." Right now, federal departments go through their documents to replace all the "shalls" with "must." It's a big hassle. If you look at page A-2, section q (PDF) of this link, it shows a sample of how a typical federal order describes this shift from "shall" to "must." Don't go through this tedious process. If you mean mandatory, write "must." If you mean prohibited, write "must not."

What should you say if someone tells you "shall is a perfectly good word?" Always agree with them because they're correct! But in your next breath, be sure to say "yes, shall is a perfectly good word, but it's not a perfectly good word of obligation."

From: https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/plain_language/articles/mandatory/

Unprecedented Excesses of Feminism in Public Policy

Women have been getting a free pass for long enough, but military jobs " for ladies only"?

Keep in mind, these are government jobs that cannot be reserved to any single demographic and no treaties or special constitutional status exists for women. Looks like there may be grounds for legal challenges.
Read in the National Post:

"Marked 'EE,' these are the Canadian Forces jobs where only women need apply"

One document shows spots in 17 jobs were designated EE, meaning employment equity, and were 'accepting applications from females only'

Is there anything dodgy DB has *not* done?

Deutsche Bank internal probe found €175m of Russian dirty money

German lender braced for potential fines and prosecutions over ‘Russian laundromat’ scandal

see article on FT

SNC-Lavalin affair.
something is definetely brewing 

AFFAIRE SNC-LAVALIN 

LA CONSTRUCTION D’UNE HÉROÏNE

LYSIANE GAGNONLA PRESSE, 9 Mars 2019

Après tous ces témoignages, dont ceux, particulièrement informatifs, de Gerald Butts et de la sous-ministre de la Justice, Nathalie Drouin, on comprend un peu mieux ce qui s’est passé dans le pseudo-scandale qui chambarde la classe politico-médiatique du Canada anglais.

Chose certaine, rien dans cette affaire ne nécessitait que le premier ministre Trudeau fasse son acte de contrition, comme le réclament les commentateurs les plus surexcités des médias anglophones.

C’est plutôt ceux qui ont élevé une statue à Jody Wilson-Raybould qui devraient faire leur examen de conscience.

Récapitulons…

Le 4 septembre, la directrice des poursuites pénales refuse de négocier un accord de poursuite suspendue avec SNC-Lavalin.

Le 11 septembre, Mme Wilson-Raybould entérine cette décision. Or, l’ex-ministre avait passé une partie de la semaine en vacances aux îles Fidji, avec 17 heures de décalage horaire. Comment a-t-elle pu, en si peu de temps, examiner un enjeu aussi complexe ? Compte tenu, surtout, qu’il s’agissait d’appliquer une loi récente, sur laquelle il n’existait pas de jurisprudence ?

Il est donc parfaitement normal que l’entourage du premier ministre, inquiet à bon droit des conséquences de cette décision, ait présumé que la ministre pouvait accepter de reconsidérer sa décision à la lumière de faits ou d’arguments nouveaux, et qu’elle ne serait pas hostile à l’idée de recourir à une expertise externe, par exemple à un juge retraité de la Cour suprême, avant d’arrêter la décision finale qui, tous en convenaient, lui revenait. C’est aussi ce que suggérait sa propre sous-ministre Nathalie Drouin, une fonctionnaire diplômée en droit et politiquement neutre.

Mais Mme Wilson-Raybould s’enferme dans le mutisme et refuse toute discussion. Dès le début, elle s’irrite de ce qu’elle interprète comme des « pressions » intolérables. Le 19 septembre, elle ordonne à sa sous-ministre de ne plus aborder cette question.

Pire encore, le greffier du Conseil privé, qui est le patron des sous-ministres, avait demandé au ministère de la Justice un avis juridique sur les conséquences d’un procès criminel pour SNC-Lavalin. L’avis est préparé. Mais la ministre interdit à Mme Drouin de le transmettre au Conseil privé ! Dans n’importe quel milieu de travail, ce genre de comportement justifierait un sérieux avertissement.

Revenons sur les « pressions » dont parle Mme Wilson-Raybould. Sur une période de quatre mois, il s’est produit une vingtaine d’échanges sous forme d’allusions verbales, au demeurant fort polies, à propos du dossier SNC-Lavalin. C’est très peu, en comparaison des pressions intenses qui s’exercent sur les ministres dans tous les dossiers « chauds ». L’ex-ministre Sheila Copps se souvient de 150 entretiens en une semaine à propos d’une loi controversée !

Trois mois passent. Jamais la ministre ne se plaint d’avoir été sujette à des « pressions inappropriées » ni auprès du premier ministre (avec lequel elle s’entend bien) ni auprès de Gerald Butts (un ami personnel).

Mieux encore, le 4 décembre, à sa propre suggestion, elle soupe en tête à tête avec M. Butts. Repas détendu de deux heures au Château Laurier : le dossier SNC-Lavalin est à peine abordé ; elle est beaucoup plus préoccupée par un autre dossier concernant les autochtones. Le lendemain, elle lui envoie un texto joyeux, amical et optimiste, qui se termine par « dis bonjour au premier ministre ».

En somme, Mme Wilson-Raybould paraît contente de son sort… jusqu’au 7 janvier, alors que le premier ministre, dans un mini-remaniement, lui offre le ministère des Services aux Autochtones, libéré par la nomination de Jane Philpott au Conseil du Trésor. M. Trudeau voulait aux Services aux Autochtones un ministre fort, histoire d’envoyer le signal que la cause lui tenait à cœur. Mme Wilson-Raybould refuse. Pour une bonne raison : elle ne veut pas avoir à appliquer la Loi sur les Indiens contre laquelle elle s’est battue comme militante autochtone. Et pour une mauvaise raison : elle veut rester à la Justice !

Or, une loi non écrite, mais partout appliquée, veut que ces nominations soient la prérogative exclusive des premiers ministres. M. Trudeau aurait pu l’exclure du cabinet. Il l’envoie au ministère des Anciens Combattants. Mme Wilson-Raybould voit, dans cette rétrogradation, une vengeance contre sa décision dans le dossier SNC-Lavalin.

Rien à voir, affirme M. Butts. Vraiment ? Toutefois, même à supposer que M. Trudeau ait voulu avoir un procureur général plus ouvert sur le dossier SNC-Lavalin, on ne peut l’accuser d’avoir choisi un homme de paille. En termes de compétence, David Lametti est un bien meilleur choix que Mme Wilson-Raybould, dont la seule expérience en droit est un passage de trois ans comme procureure dans un tribunal communautaire de Vancouver. M. Lametti est un juriste distingué, rompu au droit civil autant qu’à la common law, diplômé de Yale et d’Oxford et professeur titulaire à l’Université McGill.

Mme Wilson-Raybould reste au cabinet pendant encore quelques semaines… mais non sans avoir orchestré une riposte cinglante.

Seule une personne très proche d’elle peut avoir balancé au Globe and Mail l’historique détaillé de ce qui sera très abusivement présenté comme une opération concertée d’ingérence politique dans un dossier judiciaire.

Le 7 février paraissent les articles qui amorceront la reconstruction de Jody Wilson-Raybould dans le rôle de l’héroïne idéale, drapée dans le statut de victime à la fois comme femme et autochtone, et incorruptible porte-étendard de la règle du droit !

Même après avoir indiqué sans ambiguïté devant le comité de la justice qu’elle n’a plus confiance en Justin Trudeau, Mme Wilson-Raybould entend aujourd’hui se représenter comme candidate libérale. Fierté légitime ou arrogance stupéfiante ? À chacun d’en juger.

Mala tempora currunt

"...une pensée n'est pas figée dans l'encre d'imprimerie. Elle s'enrichit de tout de que lui apportent les générations successives et de tout ce qu'y ajoute notre expérience aux différents âges de la vie." (Pierre Wigny)

C'est pas vrai: les idées peuvent aussi s'appauvrir et être dénaturées par les générations successives. C'est ainsi que les civilisations meurent. 

Don’t Knock Offshore Balancing Until You’ve Tried It

Whatever you want to call the Obama foreign policy, it has not been a calculated attempt to contain the rise of hegemonic threats.

by Stephen M. Walt for Foreign Policy

If one thing puts defenders of the failed policy of liberal hegemony in a lather and ultimately leads them to say careless things, it is any suggestion that the United States (or the world) might be better off if Washington adopted a more selective or restrained grand strategy, such as offshore balancing. Case in point: Peter Feaver’s recent claim here in Foreign Policy that President Barack Obama “shifted decisively toward an offshore balancing strategy in 2012” and that this shift was responsible for the rise of the Islamic State and all sorts of other bad things that have recently occurred in the Middle East. In short, he would like to convince readers that offshore balancing has been tried and found wanting, in order to persuade them that the United States should keep repeating the same misguided policies of earlier administrations.

For starters, Feaver doesn’t seem to understand the core logic of offshore balancing, which is actually straightforward and well-known in the strategic studies community. He appears to equate it with any policy that reduces the U.S. military footprint or liquidates a costly and losing commitment. Anything short of the sort of muscular U.S. “leadership” that Feaver has long favored is some kind of “offshore balancing” to him.

This is silly, and Feaver should know better since he recently responded in the pages of Foreign Affairs to an article John Mearsheimer and I wrote in that same journal explaining how offshore balancing works. It is a realist grand strategy par excellence, and its core logic is driven by concerns about the balance of power in key strategic areas. Offshore balancing recommends that the United States strive to be the only great power in the Western Hemisphere (i.e., maintain its current position as a “regional hegemon”), because this position maximizes U.S. security. The United States should also try to make sure no other power achieves hegemony in Europe, Asia, or the oil-rich Persian Gulf, because these regions contain large amounts of industrial power and key strategic resources.

If no potential hegemon is present or on the horizon in any of these areas, then the United States does not need to commit its own forces there and instead can pass the buck to local powers to uphold the balance of power themselves. If a potential hegemon emerges that the local powers cannot check, then Washington should step in and do what is necessary to tilt the balance against the hegemonic danger. Offshore balancing is clearly not isolationism, therefore, since it entails constant monitoring and deployment of resources — but the level of U.S. military involvement overseas becomes a function of the balance of power in three key strategic regions and is calibrated against the size and imminence of the threat.

Many labels could be put on Obama’s Middle East policy, but “offshore balancing” is not one of them. Why? Because there is at present no hegemonic threat to the balance of power in the region; indeed, the Middle East is more divided now than at any time in living memory. There is no good strategic reason for the United States to be militarily engaged there and certainly not at the levels of the recent past. I’ve never understood what Obama & Co. think they are trying to do in this part of the world — I’ve written many columns that were critical of their actions — but they have consistently done much more than an offshore balancer would have recommended.

To be more specific: It was not offshore balancing when Obama ordered a “surge” of additional U.S. troops into Afghanistan in 2009. This unhappy country was not a vital interest for the United States; it was easy to anticipate that this policy was not going to work (and it didn’t). Adding troops to the theater there just squandered resources and political capital in an area of marginal strategic importance.

Similarly, it was hardly offshore balancing when Obama decided to help topple Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, when he tilted against Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, or when he demanded “[Bashar al-]Assad must go” at the very beginning of the Syrian uprising. And it was certainly not offshore balancing when the United States repeatedly interfered in Somali and Yemeni domestic politics as part of the “war on terror”; when it decided to organize a multinational coalition against the Islamic State; or when it provided various forms of covert support to Syrian rebel groups.

None of these actions was designed to prevent a powerful state from establishing hegemony in the Persian Gulf or greater Middle East. On the contrary, they were partly motivated by familiar counterterrorism concerns (usually exaggerated) but even more by the same familiar brand of overzealous liberal hegemony that Democrats and Republicans have been endorsing for years. Liberal hegemonists believe the United States should remain the “indispensable” nation, that its vast power should be used to spread democracy and other liberal values wherever possible. They also tend to think that it is a great strategic achievement whenever Washington gets stuck with the burden of solving some intractable international problem.

It is hard to take seriously Feaver’s specific charge: that the decision to adopt “offshore balancing” and leave Iraq in 2011 is responsible for the rise of the Islamic State and thus has to be quickly reversed. Virtually every proponent of offshore balancing opposed the Iraq War, which was the key step that led to the creation of the Islamic State. Here’s an assertion impossible to refute: If the United States had not invaded Iraq in March 2003, there would be no Islamic State today. Did the removal of U.S. troops allow a vacuum for jihadis to exploit? Perhaps. But it is hard to see how the United States, having occupied Iraq and set up a new government, could have remained in that country once that new, post-Saddam Hussein government clearly wanted us out.

Feaver does not explain how that problem could have been overcome; nor does he tell us how a continued U.S. presence would have produced a stable long-term outcome there. The United States could not control Iraq’s political evolution when it had 150,000 troops in the country, and remaining there with smaller numbers after 2012 wouldn’t have produced Sunni-Shiite reconciliation, which was essential for any semblance of stability. If anything, staying in Iraq would have made Washington complicit in former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s anti-Sunni campaign — which made many Iraqi Sunnis initially welcome the Islamic State as a hedge against the government’s Shiite sectarianism. The real lesson, however, is that once the United States had broken Iraq and ignited a bitter sectarian struggle, no viable strategy would have allowed Washington to fix it.

The bottom line is clear: Offshore balancing has not failed in the Middle East because it hasn’t been U.S. strategy for almost a generation. The United States did act like an offshore balancer from 1945 to about 1990: It had vital interests in the region and wanted to prevent any state (including the Soviet Union) from controlling the Gulf. But it pursued this goal first by relying on Great Britain (until 1967) and then by turning to local allies like the shah of Iran. After the shah fell in 1979, the United States created the Rapid Deployment Force (RDF) so it could affect the balance of power swiftly and directly and thus deter a possible Soviet foray into the Gulf. But it didn’t park the RDF in the Gulf or elsewhere in the region; instead, it kept it offshore and over the horizon and didn’t use it until Iraq seized Kuwait in August 1990.

Unfortunately, Bill Clinton’s administration abandoned this smart strategy after the first Gulf War and unwisely adopted “dual containment.” Instead of letting Iraq and Iran check each other, the United States promised to check both at the same time. This policy required keeping forces permanently in the region, which became one of the reasons Osama bin Laden attacked the American homeland on 9/11. In response, George W. Bush’s administration adopted an even more ambitious (and delusional) approach: It decided to try to transform the region into a sea of pro-American democracies, beginning with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (a decision Feaver enthusiastically supported).

We know how well that worked out! Obama was elected in part because he promised to end the Iraq War and reduce the U.S. military involvement in the region. And with some delays, he proceeded to implement the agreement to leave Iraq that Bush had negotiated and approved in 2008. The U.S. presence in the broader Middle East declined but hardly disappeared; indeed, American forces — including hundreds of drones and thousands of special operations troops — remain active in many countries in the region. As Andrew Bacevich has brilliantly recounted, the results of almost all these activities have been dismal.

Offshore balancing has not failed, for the simple reason that it hasn’t been tried. By contrast, Feaver’s prescription — more liberal hegemony — does have an abundant track record, and the results are not pretty. It is little wonder he mischaracterizes the strategy that underpins Obama’s failures and misrepresents the strategic alternatives. He is surely hoping Americans will forget all the trouble that has been caused by overzealous U.S. efforts to police the world and shape local politics in far-flung regions. After all, forgetting past failures is the first step toward repeating them.

From: http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/12/08/dont-knock-offshore-balancing-youve-tried-it-obama-middle-east-realism-liberal-hegemony/amp/