Legal Analogy in the Cases of Overcoming a Contract’s Verbal and Numerical Ambiguity

Abstract

The relevance of the research stems from the wider spread of contract conflicts and legal disputes caused by verbal and numerical ambiguity of certain contract terms, given the absence of a special legislative rule to overcome such ambiguities. The work aims to identify and evaluate the most effective law enforcement methods of overcoming the discrepancy of the notations of quantitative values in a contract that is expressed with words and numbers. Research methods included a special technical–legal toolkit, including methods of analogy and legal modeling, civil doctrine means of analysis and synthesis, induction, and deduction, as well as comparison and generalization. As a result, the paper refutes the universal character of the analogy of law as a method of overcoming legal gaps in the area under study. At the same time, the active and positive role of analogy as a part of other methods of interpretation of ambiguous contractual provisions, such as literal interpretation, combination of textual and contextual interpretations, and its appeal to tradition, isshown. The significance of the work lies not only in its ability to orient lawyers and practitioners in a set of different options to overcome the verbal and numerical ambiguity of the contracts but also to indicate ways to solve common problems associated with the ambiguities and incompleteness that come with the contractual terms.

Keywords

• legal analogy
• contract
• verbal ambiguity
• numerical ambiguity