Without internal punctuation, weren't lists of a series of items and activities prone to ambiguity and debate?

Question

I can't imagine how shunning internal punctuation would've assisted to construe "a series of items or activities". Even with internal punctuation now, and canons of interpretation, "series of items or activities" can be ambiguous, and are arguable and appealed to final courts of appeal.

Why did  legal convention forbide the use of many types of internal punctuation?

How did legal professionals tussle with the ambiguity and unreadable eyesore?

You may notice that some older judges and lawyers do not use
commas when listing a series of items or activities. This is a holdover
from older days, when legal convention forbade the use of many
types of internal punctuation. It used to be that courts would use
internal punctuation to construe the terms of a document in a specific
manner and lawyers attempted to evade that sort of construction
by eliminating punctuation altogether. Such conventions have
now largely disappeared, and you should follow the rules of grammar
unless otherwise instructed by your employer.

Stacie Strong. BA English literature (UC Davis 1986), MPW (USC 1990), JD (Duke 1994), PhD Law (Cambridge 2002), DPhil (Oxford 2003). How to Write Law Essays & Exams 5th Edition (2018). p 149.

Steve · Accepted Answer

Unfortunately this very question is prone to ambiguity and debate.
The practice of lawyers has never been simply to shun punctuation, so that essentially the same phrasings and styles are present but with all the commas removed, so as to produce visual chaos.
Rather, the convention was that the interpretation should not depend on certain kinds of punctuation. And if any such punctuation is truly intended to be nugatory, then why adorn the text with it at all?
If we take "he eats shoots and leaves" as a standard example illustrating the value of commas, a legal rendering of this could be "he eats then shoots then leaves" (when referring to three diverse actions done in sequence) or "he eats shoots and also eats leaves" (when referring to two kinds of food eaten).
Note we have used no punctuation and yet the meaning in each case is now clear and explicit (and I confess I had to spend a few minutes to get them right).
There are a variety of strategies for avoiding reliance on punctuation marks, including labelling each item with a letter or a number, vertical lists, or using appropriate connecting or introductory words, or substituting ambiguous words for unambiguous.
The principle of avoiding punctuation also avoids the temptation of overly long or complex sentences, where the hazard may not be the punctuation as such, but the arrangement and ambiguous relation of clauses.
Also note that historically when nearly all documents would be written out by hand (probably reasonably common up to the 1970s), it may not always have been easy to distinguish between ink blots and smudges on the one hand, and actual punctuation on the other, or to identify when punctuation had been fraudulently added to a document. It also makes it more difficult to compare copies of a document.

PassingTime · Answer

I'm no expert on the matter as I have no knowledge of anything court, but my best guess as someone from a visual design background is that perhaps the punctuation was left out to make room for intentional ambiguity.
Punctuation is in nature quite intentional. It's meant there as a visual guide to show the reader where to pause, where to stop the sentence. Also where there's suspense...... 'Where to pay attention', "where something was literally said", whether you are unsure? alarmed! and so forth.
Without any form of punctuation you can decide for yourself where you pause sure it's not quite as readable or intuitive as text with all those punctuations and quotations but if you want a second opinion from another judge about something at some point it may be more unbiased when it's without visual guide Just food for thought
....
Another reason I can think of is that in the past, perhaps they still didn't have the luxury of recording devices and such, a statement had to be typed out in full and the one typing it all out had to keep up with what was spoken. Which meant fast typing in order to keep up and not miss part of the statement in your report. If you skip the punctuations, you can type a lot faster.
Perhaps these things combined could be a plausible answer to your first question.
To be sure, and to answer your second question you'd have to consult someone who has knowledge in the field.

Without internal punctuation, weren't lists of a series of items and activities prone to ambiguity and debate?

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