The following excerpt is from Hodge v. Mountain States Tel. & Tel. Co., 555 F.2d 254 (9th Cir. 1977):
1 I think note should be taken of the extraordinarily inept draftsmanship of 605. The "exceptions" are not stated as exceptions at all. Quite to the contrary, the section as drawn explicitly forbids divulgence to the very persons who, one would reasonably suppose, should have the information divulged to them. When the section was amended in 1968, thirty-four years after this language was first used, the sense (or nonsense) of the original language was meticulously preserved, word for word, and the fact that it was intended to mean exactly what it said is strongly suggested by the fact that the numerals (1) through (6) were added to the original language to replace the word "or," thus lending emphasis to the point that (2) through (6) were to serve the same function as (1). Nevertheless, United States v. Finn, 502 F.2d 938, 942-43 (7th Cir. 1974), sensibly held that this apparently deliberate perpetuation of forthright language should not preclude the courts from striving to write sense into the section by recognizing that what is stated as a prohibition was intended to be a statement of an exception to the prohibition. All other courts faced with the problem seem tacitly to have agreed with that result.
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