Lotes de transacci´ on m´ınimos

The provisions in the BNA for depriving a person of British Citizenship and for registering a renunciation of British Citizenship involve seemingly inscrutable references to satisfying the Secretary of State. However, under the assumption that the Secretary of State is a rational person, not all of these references are as impenetrable as they may seem. Consider, for example, the main provision for acquiring British Citizenship by naturalisation:

6.-(1) If, on an application for naturalisation as a British citizen made by a person of full age and capacity, the Secretary of State is satisfied that the applicant fulfils the requirements of Schedule 1 for naturalisation as such a citizen under this sub-section, he may, if he thinksfit, grant to him a certificate of naturalisation as such a citizen.

At the top-most level, this has the logical form:

the secretary of state may grant a certificate of naturalisation to a person by section 6.1

if the person applies for naturalisation and the person is of full age and capacity and the secretary of state is satisfied that

the person fulfils the requirements of schedule 1 for naturalisation by 6.1

and the secretary of state thinksfit

to grant the person a certificate of naturalisation.

Thefirst two conditions are simple object-level conditions concerning the state of the world. But the last two conditions are epistemic or meta-level conditions concerning the Secretary of State’s state of mind. In theory, the last condition is totally inscrutable and can only be given as part of the input for a given case. However, in practice, an expert lawyer might be able to predict with a high

degree of certainty how the Secretary of State will decide new cases based on the lawyer’s knowledge of previous decisions in similar, old cases.

The third condition is more interesting, because the BNA includes a speci- fication of the requirements for naturalisation that an applicant must fulfil to the satisfaction of the Secretary of State. If the Secretary of State’s state of mind were entirely impenetrable, there would be no point in specifying these require- ments. The schedule is quite long, and it is convenient therefore to summarise and paraphrase its contents:

a person fulfils the requirements of schedule 1 for naturalisation by 6.1 if either the person fulfils the residency requirements

of subparagraph 1.1.2

or the person fulfils the crown service requirements of subparagraph 1.1.3

and the person is of good character and the person has sufficient knowledge

of english, welsh, or scottish gaelic

and the person has sufficient knowledge about life in the uk and either the person intends to make his principal home in the uk

in the event of being granted naturalisation

or the person intends to enter or continue in crown service or other service in the interests of the crown in the event of being granted naturalisation.

On the assumption that the Secretary of State is a rational person and that all rational people understand the meaning of the wordsif,orandandas they occur in schedule 1 in the same way, it can be shown that:

the secretary of state is satisfied that

a person fulfils the requirements of schedule 1 for naturalisation by 6.1 if either the secretary of state is satisfied that

the person fulfils the residency requirements of subparagraph 1.1.2 or the secretary of state is satisfied that

the person fulfils the crown service requirements of subparagraph 1.1.3 and the secretary of state is satisfied that

the person is of good character and the secretary of state is satisfied that

the person has sufficient knowledge of english, welsh, or scottish gaelic and the secretary of state is satisfied that

the person has sufficient knowledge about life in the uk and either the secretary of state is satisfied that

the person intends to make his principal home in the uk in the event of being granted naturalisation

or the secretary of state is satisfied that

the person intends to enter or continue in crown service or other service in the interests of the crown in the event of being granted naturalisation.

The result is an explicit, though tedious statement of what it takes to satisfy the Secretary of State concerning the requirements for naturalisation. We will see how to derive this explicit form inChapter 17.

As we have seen, compared with ordinary English, the language of the BNA is extraordinarily, and at times even painfully precise. Its precision is due in large part to its use of conditional form, which helps to eliminate ambiguity.

A syntactic expression is ambiguous when it has several distinct identifiable meanings. For example, the word he is ambiguous in the following pair of sentences:

The Secretary of State deprived Bob Smith of his British citizenship. He was very upset about it.

Ambiguity can be eliminated simply by replacing the ambiguous expression by a precise expression that represents its intended meaning; for example, by replacing the word he in the second sentence above either by the Secretary of State or by Bob Smith.

The conditional form of CL helps to reduce the ambiguity associated with such relative clauses as who was born in the UK. As we have seen, restrictive relative clauses add extra conditions to conditionals, whereas non-restrictive relative clauses add extra conclusions.

Ambiguity is distinct from, but often confused with vagueness. Ambiguity arises when a syntactic expression has several distinct interpretations, all of which can be expressed explicitly. Vagueness, on the other hand, arises when a concept, like newborn infant has no crisp, hard and fast definition. Logic tolerates vagueness, but does not tolerate ambiguity. It accommodates vague concepts as conditions of conditionals, simply by not attempting to define them in the conclusions of other conditionals.

Although, like ambiguity, vagueness causes problems of interpretation, it is often useful in practice, because it allows the law to evolve and adapt to changing circumstances. Arguably, however, except for its use in poetry, humour and deception, ambiguity serves no other useful purpose.

Whereas the syntax of the BNA is expressed in explicit conditional form, the syntax of the University of Michigan lease termination clause below is both unstructured and highly ambiguous. The termination clause was originally

investigated by Allen and Saxon to illustrate the use of propositional logic to formulate a precise interpretation of an ambiguous legal text. Significantly, the intended interpretation identified by Allen and Saxon has the conditional form associated with Computational Logic.