The Avoidance of Circularity

Abstract

One of the earliest and most basic lessons that a legislative drafter learns is that circularity in a definition must be avoided at all costs because it literally renders the definition meaningless. Having absorbed that basic lesson, the neophyte drafter quickly learns that a definition may sometimes appear circular superficially, without actually being so: for example, a word that carries a sufficient natural language meaning to stand alone without definition, may be the subject of a definition that uses the word itself, but merely as a peg for a qualification or limitation (“‘vehicle’ includes any vehicle whether or not…”). Constructions using that kind of apparent circularity apart, there is never any excuse for real circularity in a definition, and every drafter is taught to check her or his work with particular attention to the possibility of a circularity having crept in unwittingly. When the courts spot circularity they are rightly...