Casebook

What a missing sentence costs.

Real statutes and the decisions they produced. For each: the text as enacted, the two readings the parties argued, the court's path to a resolution, and the drafting that would have made the case unnecessary. Public sources throughout; nothing here is privileged.

Costa v. Brait Builders Corp. · 463 Mass. 65, SJC-11011 (2012)

The statute said nothing about waiver. Litigation said the rest.

One sentence in the mechanic's lien statute forbids waiver. The public-works bond statute copied from it never got that sentence. The Supreme Judicial Court had to supply it forty years later.

Statute: G.L. c. 149, § 29
Defect: Silence on a question the parallel statute answered expressly — an omission a court had to fill from purpose and policy because the text gave it nothing.

Read the example

More examples are in preparation. The selection criterion is simple: a published appellate decision in which the court says, in one form or another, that the text does not answer the question.