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Comment by einhverfr | Hacker News Reader

Dude, I so want to go there, apply, and write at the bottom of the page:

"No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States." -- And that's the law of the land. Please try to parse that until your head explodes.

Edit: I think I would add to that "Also, in your opinion does this mean that once you have been in the country for 14 years you are no longer eligible to be President?"

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Combining "not" with "and" or "or" leads to ambiguity - there are no operator precedence rules in spoken language. I remember a "eating and drinking forbidden in the lab" notice with "not (eat or drink) == not eat or not drink" scribbled underneath (in math notation).

Also notice comma placement, which makes the citizenship requirement very interesting to try to parse. Is there anyone alive today who qualifies?

Which is why you should avoid commas in legal documents and especially patents

This is crystal-clear to me. What's the problem?

By Contemporary Standard American English standards comma placements are strewn throughout the sentence with very little regard for clarity (removing a few would make it clearer), and the logical relation between clauses leaves something to be desired.

Are you proposing that the constitution be re-written for grammar every couple of decades?

No, but it isn't even clear that the Constitution obeyed perfectly the standards of spelling and grammar of "it's" day.

is it clear that there were any such standards?

Standards for comma usage weren't established until almost the end of the 19th century. Some people used breathing or personal stylistics to decide on comma use, but there certainly was no general expectation that it would follow grammatical construction or logic.

Compared to some other 18th century documents I've read, the US Constitution is downright spare with commas.

However, by the standards of English then in effect, it makes perfect sense. Part of the problem is that written English prior to the 1900s included a large element of (conscious or subconscious) verbalization of what was written.

Try reading the Constitution out loud, taking appropriate breaks at the punctuation. It becomes a lot easier to understand and read; most (but not all) of the ambiguity will disappear.

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.

The grammar rule is that you can remove a clause within the commas - so this becomes:

No Person except a natural born Citizen at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.

So unless you were born sometime before 1776 you aren't going to be hitting the campaign trail

You have a point there.

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States (at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution), shall be eligible to the Office of President.
Neither shall any person be eligible to that Office [of the President] who shall not have attained to:
- the Age of thirty five Years, and

- been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

There, fixed it for you. It's not that difficult to understand when you know how legal parsing works. In this case, the use of two subordinate clauses at the end of the first sentence indicates that the first subordinate clause is subordinate to the phrase before it, while the second subordinate clause is subordinate to the ("super") clause preceding the third clause. The super clause consists of the first and second clauses, because they are joined by a coordinating conjunction.

What about this parsing of your text?

No Person except [ [a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States] (at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution) ] shall be eligible to the Office of President.

The canons of statutory interpretation forbid absurd, unreasonable or unjust interpretations. I believe that ultimately this is what lets the courts discard the odd parse trees.

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