Definition purpose

Section 2 of almost every Indian statute opens with a wall of definitions before a single substantive rule appears. Why bother? Because the entire rest of the Act depends on everyone agreeing on exactly what ‘consumer’, ‘employee’ or ‘document’ means — and disagreement about a definition, not the rule itself, is where most legal arguments actually begin.

In two minutes

A definition serves several distinct purposes: it fixes the meaning of a term to remove ambiguity, increases the term's connotation for precision, resolves verbal disputes, teaches the meaning of an unfamiliar term, and stipulates a special or technical sense for a particular field such as law — and different definitions are judged good or bad by which of these purposes they were meant to serve.

The rest of this chapter

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