This isn't strictly on-topic, but I though readers of this list would be interested in a recent summary trial in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Smith Bros. & Wilson (B.C.) Ltd. v. British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority. A key issue was the legal meaning of the term "11:00 a.m.". The ambiguity arose because a time of day expressed in that format is ambiguous: it can refer either to an instant (i.e. exactly eleven hours after midnight) or a 60-second period (i.e. the period more than eleven hours after midnight but less than eleven hours one minute after midnight). Here, a $13-million contract turned on this fine distinction. The defendant B.C. Hydro had issued tender instructions for the contract stating a closing time of "11:00 a.m. local time". The bid of the plaintiff Smith Bros. and Wilson was submitted when B.C. Hydro's clock said 11:01, and stamped accordingly. However, at trial, there was evidence from one of B.C. Hydro's own engineers that the clock was approximately one minute fast, compared to Pacific Standard Time determined with reference to the U.S. Naval Observatory clock in Washington D.C. This part of the judgment makes interesting reading, because the engineer had done the testing for his report two weeks after the day the tenders were due, but was still able to find (based on certain assumptions) the clock's differential on the tendering day. Since the clock was about a minute fast, the plaintiff's bid was actually submitted at 11:00, not 11:01. But this still wasn't good enough, because the court held that 11:00, in its everyday meaning of "the period from 11:00:00 to just before 11:01:00", was not what was meant by the tender instructions. Rather, the tender instructions were read to mean bids could be submitted up to 10:59:59, but not one second after that. The judge stated: [33] B.C. Hydro and Smith Bros. cited cases in which expressions like "until the 1st day of July next", for example, were used. See: Re Smith and McPherson (1921), 51 O.L.R. 457 (App. Div.). The purport of those decisions is that the whole of the named day was intended to be included. The argument is that if the naming of a day imports the whole of that day, the stating of time in hours and minutes should import the whole of that minute as being included in the calculation of the time limit. I do not agree with this analogy. In my opinion, 11:00 a.m. describes a precise point in time, not the time that exists between 11:00 a.m. and 11:01 a.m., whereas, when a date is stated, it is common knowledge and usage that that named day is a 24 hour period from midnight to midnight. The full text of the reasons for judgment is available on the web at http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/sc/97/03/s97-0302.txt and there is an article on the case in The Lawyer's Weekly, 21 March 1997, p. 16. M. Englander