Are the abbreviations &quot;IANAL&quot; and &quot;TINLA&quot; legally valid substitutes for their full forms? tl;dr: I've often seen the disclaimer "I am not a lawyer" abbreviated as "IANAL". And I've often seen the disclaimer "this is not legal advice" abbreviated as "TINLA". Is it legally just as effective to use the abbreviations as disclaimers by themselves, instead of using their full form disclaimers? Or are people wasting space and time by adding "IANAL" or "TINLA" to their writing? too long; don't read: There seems to be plenty of debate about whether such disclaimers (either in full form or abbreviated) are even required at all, for example, in these questions. (FWIW, I think equivalent disclaimers apply site-wide within Law Stack Exchange, as stated in the Tour and Help Center.) But I'm probably using the wrong terminology, because everything I find in Internet searches pertains to style/grammar of abbreviation usage generally, or to using vs. avoiding these specific disclaimers generally (regardless of form), whereas I'm wondering about the validity of the abbreviations specifically, as valid legal substitutes for their full forms. In other words, if someone writes just "IANAL" or "TINLA"... Does it have the same legal effect as if they had written "I am not a lawyer" or "this is not legal advice" (respectively)? Or... Is it legally equivalent to having omitted the disclaimer entirely, i.e. effectively useless? Not sure if this rabbit hole is relevant, but thinking about it some more, I wonder if it might boil down to questions of a more general nature: (A) Within a self-contained written work, does an abbreviation have the same legal effect as its full form (even in the complete absence of the full form or any other explicit definition of the abbreviation from the written work)? (B) Are there specific requirements regarding which abbreviations qualify to legally represent which specific full forms? At the time of this writing, Wikipedia's List of legal abbreviations states that: It is common practice in legal documents to cite to [sic?] other publications by using standard abbreviations for the title of each source. Abbreviations may also be found for common words or legal phrases. Such citations and abbreviations are found in court decisions, statutes, regulations, journal articles, books, and other documents [emphasis added]. Though these statements are currently unsourced[citation needed] and may not represent a worldwide view of the subject, they seem to suggest that (A) might be true. Is there a formal legal definition for this somewhere? For (B), definitions for "IANAL" and "TINLA" seem to be absent from common legal definitions at this time, for example, Wikipedia's list and some of the online resources linked there: ALLACRONYMS Legal Abbreviations Cardiff University's Index to Legal Abbreviations The Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C.'s Common Abbreviations and Legal Citation Examples for Selected Federal Government Documents Yet definitions for "IANAL" seem to be commonly found online, and similarly for "TINLA" (perhaps less-so, but still common) – so common as to be entirely unambiguous, by my assessment. So is this sufficient for them to qualify as valid legal abbreviations for their respective full form disclaimers of "I am not a lawyer" and "this is not legal advice"?
Stating "This is not blue" or "TINB" on something that is self-evidently blue is of no legal effect Legal advice has the following characteristics: Requires legal knowledge, skill, education and judgment Applies specific law to a particular set of circumstances Affects someone's legal rights or responsibilities Creates rights and responsibilities in the advice-giver If the advice you give meets these criteria then it is legal advice. However, if you are clear that you are not a lawyer and that you are not giving legal advice then this undermines the characteristics above. That is, what would be legal advice without such a disclaimer may lose that characteristic if the disclaimer is genuinely given in the particular circumstances. Context matters: "this is not legal advice (wink, wink)" is not a disclaimer and doesn't turn legal advice into not legal advice. Similarly, the disclaimer must be genuinely understood by the recipient so that they are adequately warned to do their own research or seek actual legal advice before taking the course of action outlined. Using an abbreviation is more likely to be misunderstood but, again, context matters. In the context of this particular site (see various meta questions), which goes out of its way to explain that this is not legal advice the disclaimer is hardly necessary and the abbreviation would be fine. More generally Communication is always under tension between clarity and brevity. It should be detailed enough that it can be understood by its audience but not so long that its audience switches off. Abbreviations, acronyms, symbols and jargon (all of which I’m going to abbreviate to abbreviations) sacrifice clarity for brevity. Depending on the context and the target audience an abbreviation may or may not need to be spelled out in full. In formal writing, it is good practice to spell them out when first used and put the abbreviated form in parenthesis immediately afterward. Alternatively, scientific and engineering reports may use a glossary at the front or back to list them all in one place. It is extremely good practice to explain these abbreviations in any document that is intended to have direct legal consequences like legislation or a contract. Here clarity is waaaay more important than brevity. In a similar vein, it is quite common for such documents to explicitly define real words that already exist to narrow or broaden their scope in the interests of clarity. However, sufficiently common abbreviations may not be spelled out even in these. For example, USA, UN, UK, and EU are in such common usage that they would not need to be spelled out. Similarly, state or province abbreviations would not need explanation within their own country - while an American should know what IA means they might struggle with NSW. Similarly, some contractions may be so common within a profession or industry that no explanation is needed. For example, no scientist or engineer would need to be told what Pa, N, and m mean. In more informal settings (like texts or WhatsApp chats) spelling them out would make you look like a pompous dickhead. If it's sufficiently clear that a reasonable person in the position of the recipient would understand it then legal consequences can flow from it. Ultimately the decision of it it was clear would be a matter for whoever was deciding any dispute about it.
(Since this is looking rather close to looking for legal advice: "I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, don't sue my pants off".) The relevant section of the license is this (bolding mine): You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in con-nection with the exchange of copyrighted works. Therefore, if you are using the content licensed under the BY-NC-SA primarily to make money, that is a breach of the license. Any more advice past that is wading seriously into legal advice.
We could start with what the statutes say (HSC 102425) (a) The certificate of live birth for a live birth occurring on or after January 1, 2016, shall contain those items necessary to establish the fact of the birth and shall contain only the following information; (1) Full name and sex of the child. It says nothing about the form of that name. Therefore, any prohibition of the letter Æ (or æ) etc. would have to come from the administrative interpretation of California Department of Public Health, Vital Records. There is a long handbook, which on p. 112 states the rule regarding child names. The rules note that The form must be completed using the 26 alphabetical characters of the English language with appropriate punctuation, if necessary. No pictographs (☺), ideograms (⇑), diacritical marks (è, ñ, ē, ç), or extraneous entries are allowed. So the short answer is, unless you feel like making a court case out of the matter and you have a lot of money, this name will not be allowed. The rule might be challenged in court as exceeding statutory authority, and might well be deemed to discriminate w.r.t. race and national origin. The rule could be defended on grounds of necessity, if we presume that the department is incapable of recording information other than the 26 letters and &quot;appropriate punctuation&quot; (undefined, presumably only apostrophe). It's not that in principle Unicode doesn't exist, it's that their system may not be capable of dealing with it (numerous problems would arise from the non-unique mapping from visual representation to Unicode number). There does not seem to be a court ruling on the matter.
That's the entire point of a summary proceeding. You're allegedly found committing an offence, that isn't worth the court's time to hear but nevertheless requires some penalty. The only way to "unambiguously deny liability" is by requesting a hearing and denying liability in the notice of this. The court doesn't care what you say to everybody else, it cares what you say on its record. The reasoning is, if you're so sure you're not guilty of an offence, why haven't you sought to argue this in court? And if you weren't committing the offence, why did the informant serve the infringement notice in the first place? The act is not silent at all on this. If you don't request the hearing and serve such notice by the date required, you are liable to enforcement action - whether you deny liability out of court is irrelevant.
One of the principles of contract law is that the offer and acceptance are evaluated based on the objectively ascertainable intentions as judged by a reasonable person. On the facts that you have provided - even if your friend claims that they filled it out wrong, there is no reason for someone to objectively think so, particularly given the fact that they went to the trouble of writing the information in. However, this will depend on what kind of legally binding document this is. If it is, in fact, a contract, then the employer must accept it before it becomes legally binding, and they must actually communicate this acceptance to your friend (the offeror). If this is a policy document, then it is only legally binding if another contract has said that it is legally binding - generally, (smart) employers will include a clause in their employment contract stating that you are to adhere to policies but that those policies do not form part of the contract. If that is the case, then your friend is legally bound by the terms of the policy and will breach their employment contract if they do not adhere to this policy. This is unlikely to be an issue of contract law in and of itself - your friend cannot unilaterally bind their employer to terms as he sees fit. More information - including the nature of the document and other agreements that were made - would be required to provide more useful information (and that's what you would give to a lawyer).
&quot;Mathematician&quot; is not a legally regulated term, so there are no laws that would prohibit me from calling myself a mathematician (I am not one). I do know a tiny bit about number theory, set theory, formal language theory and logic, but mostly I know about African languages. If I have no shame, I can legally call myself a mathematician. My employing institution has no policy that regulates self-appellation. In fact it is very common for people to self-mislabel in the fashion that you describe. Many people claim to be &quot;linguists&quot; when they are actually &quot;English teachers&quot; or are &quot;translators&quot;. However, if I were to claim to have a PhD from the Department of Mathematics at Yale University, that would be a false statement of fact, and potentially internally-actionable by the institution. My actual mathematician colleagues cannot sue me for damages (they have not been objectively harmed), but an institution could sack me for material misrepresentation of credentials (for which reason they might actually demand a copy of said credential). It is possible that a materially false statement of credential could be actionable as fraud, though I can't come up with a plausible scenario at the moment.
See Attorney at law, is there any other kind? As expatiated on English Stack Exchange, Attorney-At-Law can be distinguished from Attorney-In-Fact. I quote from the University of New Mexico's Judicial Education Center Attorney-at-Law – A licensed advocate or counsel authorized by the courts to prepare, manage and try cases in court, to prepare legal documents, or otherwise represent the interests of citizens. Attorney-in-Fact - A private person (who is not necessarily a lawyer) authorized by another to act in his/her place, either for some particular purpose, as to do a specified act; or for the transaction of business in general, not of legal character. This authority is conferred by an instrument in writing, called a letter of attorney, or more commonly a power of attorney. Grammarphobia dated August 23 2012 answers your question. Q: Why is a lawyer called an “attorney at law” and not an “attorney of law”? Doesn’t “at” refer to a place? An MD is a “doctor of medicine” not a “doctor at medicine.” A: In American English, the terms “lawyer,” “attorney,” and “attorney at law” are pretty much interchangeable, according to Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage (3rd ed.). All three refer to “a licensed lawyer.” The legal dictionary, written by Bryan A. Garner, says “lawyer” and “attorney,” the most common of these terms in the US, “are not generally distinguished even by members of the profession.” However, these three terms have had different meanings in different places and times. In England, for example, an attorney used to practice in common-law courts and a solicitor in equity courts. But the term “attorney” developed “an unpleasant smell about it,” Garner writes, and “in the nineteenth century it was supplanted in England by solicitor.” (As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the word “attorney” was often used reproachfully to mean something like “knave or swindler.”) In the US, on the other hand, the term “attorney” has become a somewhat tony (or, as Garner puts it, more formal and less disparaging) version of “lawyer,” while “solicitor” has taken on an offensive whiff, as in signs like “No Peddlers or Solicitors.” Why, you ask, is an attorney “at” law rather than “of” or “in” law? Doesn’t “at” refer to a place? Well, all three prepositions were used in the past, according to published references in the OED, but they referred to the place where the attorney practiced, not to the practice of law itself. The Oxford editors say “attorney-at-law” (they hyphenate the term) originally referred to a “professional and properly-qualified legal agent practising in the courts of Common Law (as a solicitor practised in the courts of Equity).” Interestingly, the earliest OED citation for “attorney at law,” from William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1768), refers to lawyers at admiralty and ecclesiastical courts, not courts of common law: “An attorney at law answers to the procurator, or proctor, of the civilians and canonists.” (A procurator, or proctor, used to be a legal representative in English admiralty or ecclesiastical courts.) Why, you might wonder, has the term “attorney at law” survived when “attorney” and “lawyer” can do the job just as well with two fewer words? Well, we could be cynical and say that the kind of lawyer who feels it’s classy to be called an “attorney” would probably feel it’s even classier to be called an “attorney at law.” But there’s a more respectable reason for the survival of the longer term. It distinguishes an “attorney at law” (a licensed lawyer) from an “attorney in fact” (someone with a power of attorney to act for another). In fact, when the word “attorney” entered English in the 1300s (borrowed from Old French), it referred to someone “appointed or ordained to act for another; an agent, deputy, commissioner,” according to the OED. Here’s an example from Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (circa 1594): I will attend my husband, be his nurse, Diet his sickness, for it is my office, And will have no attorney but myself; And therefore let me have him home with me. By the 1400s, the word “attorney” was being used to mean a lawyer practicing in the common-law courts in England. But around the same time it took on its negative sense. Here’s a later example from Alexander Pope’s essay Of the Use of Riches (1733): “Vile Attornies, now an useless race.” And here’s one from The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), by James Boswell: “Johnson observed, that ‘he did not care to speak ill of any man behind his back, but he believed the gentleman was an attorney.’ ” The word “lawyer,” which entered English around the same time as “attorney,” has roots in the Old English word for law, lagu. From the beginning, according to the OED, it meant what it does now: “One versed in the law; a member of the legal profession.” We’ll end with this proverb from The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), by Thomas Wilson: “The lawyer never dieth a begger. The lawyer can never want a livyng till the yearth want men.”
I've retracted and replaced my previous answer. It is a citation to legal authority. It is probably a reference to the book &quot;Hale, The History of the Pleas of the Crown Hale PC&quot; (originally published 1736 with later editions also printed) (see 4.2.3) with Hale abbreviated &quot;Hal.&quot;, &quot;pl.&quot; being an abbreviation for &quot;plea&quot; (see 4.2.2) and &quot;cr.&quot; being an abbreviation for &quot;crown&quot;. Standard citation form is to spell it out, but if it is cited repeatedly later instances might be abbreviated. The link is to a scanned version of the out of copyright historical legal treatise on criminal procedure and substantive criminal law. Wikipedia also discusses it as does a law library Wiki.