On 06/15/2011 04:52 PM, Kerim Aydin wrote: > if disclaimers work immediately > forward, it would imply they could work immediately backwards
(I suggest using 'atomic message' to mean the ordinary sense of an email message, and 'compound message' to mean the legal fiction of a message reconstructed from parts.) This is not at all obvious to me. Backwards-disclaimers *might* work if the disclaimer was in the same atomic message as the disclaimed text, but in the case of any kind of confusion, I would strongly lean towards evaluating in chronological order, with the context of each statement determined solely by its predecessors. For example, a single atomic message reading "I register. The preceding statement has no effect." would probably not result in a registration due to general reasonableness, but "The following statement has no effect. The other two statements in this message have no effect. I register." probably would, because a strict reading is necessary in order to make sense of it. In this case, I believe it was reasonably clear from my first atomic message alone that that atom was not the last in the compound. In CFJs 1451-2, the extent of the compound could only be inferred from timing, and only after the compound had ended and some time had passed. Since the compound in 1451-2 was good enough, this one ought to be as well. (I would have suggested a general rule that if it is not made clear in a given atom whether there are further atoms in the compound, then that atom should be taken as ending the compound, regardless of the content of later atomic messages. However, this level of strictness contradicts the 1451-2 precedent; we must either choose a laxer standard, or else overturn 1451-2.) Pavitra
