Wilfulness, a lesson in ambiguity

Abstract

Others, I am not the first,Have willed more mischief than they durst.Many words do not have a single meaning. There is rarely a problem where two different words of the same spelling have a different meaning as the context usually will clarify which of the alternative words is intended. The difficulty arises where the same word has more than one meaning and the different meanings are not unrelated to each other. The word wilful is such a word and much would have been gained if it had been struck out of the Parliamentary draftsman's dictionary many years ago. Very popular in Victorian legislation, its use in modern drafting is less common, but it still haunts the statute book providing problems of interpretation and illustrating the underlying conceptual weakness of much of English law.