The Oxford comma lawsuit is O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, a Maine overtime case decided by the First Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017. A missing serial comma in the state’s overtime exemption made the law ambiguous, the court read that ambiguity in favor of the workers, and Oakhurst Dairy later paid roughly $5 million to about 127 delivery drivers who had been denied time-and-a-half pay.
The Missing Comma in Maine’s Overtime Law
Maine’s overtime statute, 26 M.R.S.A. § 664(3)(F), exempted certain perishable-foods work from the requirement to pay time-and-a-half after 40 hours. The exemption covered:
“The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods.”
Look at the end of the list. Is “packing for shipment or distribution” one activity, or two? Without a comma after “shipment,” the phrase can be read either way. If it is one activity, only workers who pack goods for shipment or for distribution are exempt. If it is two, anyone who distributes perishable foods is exempt as well, whether or not they ever pack anything.
That difference decided who got paid. Oakhurst’s drivers distributed dairy products. They did no packing.
Who Sued and Why
On May 5, 2014, Kevin O’Connor, Christopher O’Connor, James Adam Cox, Michael Fraser, and Robert McNally filed suit against Oakhurst Dairy and its parent company, Dairy Farmers of America, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine.1Justia. O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, No. 16-1901 They sought more than four years of unpaid overtime wages under federal and state law.2Illinois State Bar Association. The $10 Million Comma
The District Court Sided With the Dairy
The district court granted summary judgment for Oakhurst. Despite the missing comma, the judge concluded the Maine legislature “unambiguously intended” for “distribution” to be its own exempt activity, separate from “packing.”3U.S. Courts. O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, No. 16-1901 Opinion Oakhurst pointed to the Maine Legislative Drafting Manual, which tells drafters not to use a serial comma between the last two items in a list, suggesting the omission was routine rather than meaningful.1Justia. O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, No. 16-1901 The dairy also cited an unpublished 2002 Maine Superior Court opinion, Thompson v. Shaw’s Supermarkets, Inc., which had treated the exemption as covering distribution on its own.4GovInfo. O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, USCOURTS-ca1-16-01901 The drivers appealed.
The First Circuit Reversed
On March 13, 2017, a unanimous three-judge panel reversed the district court in a 29-page opinion by Judge David Barron.5Portland Press Herald. Dairy Drivers OT Case Made Famous by a Missing Comma Settled for $5 Million The opinion opened with the line that made the case famous: “For want of a comma, we have this case.”6ABA Journal. Oxford Comma Issue Benefits Drivers in Overtime Case
The court worked through the grammar carefully. Every other activity in the exemption was a gerund: canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing. “Distribution” is a noun. Under the parallel usage convention, list items should share a grammatical form. That mismatch supported the drivers’ reading: “distribution” was not a standalone entry but a second object of the preposition “for,” paired with “shipment” and both attached to “packing.”1Justia. O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, No. 16-1901
The court also weighed the Maine drafting manual against federal drafting guides, including those for the U.S. House and Senate, which recommend using a serial comma to prevent exactly this kind of misreading. After examining text, grammar, drafting conventions, and legislative history, the panel concluded the arguments on each side were roughly a draw.7Federal Bar Association. Commentary on O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy
That tie triggered a Maine rule of construction: an ambiguous wage-and-hour statute must be read liberally “to further the beneficent purposes for which [it was] enacted.”8Cornell Law School Journal of Law and Public Policy. Dairy Farmers, a Missing Comma: O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy Because the drivers’ reading kept them inside overtime protection, that reading won. The case went back to the district court.1Justia. O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, No. 16-1901
The $5 Million Settlement
Oakhurst chose to settle rather than retry the case. Court documents filed on February 8, 2018, proposed a $5 million payment covering approximately 127 drivers.9New York Times. Oxford Comma Dispute Is Settled as Maine Drivers Get $5 Million10Bloomberg Tax. Oakhurst Dairy’s $5M Settlement Driven by Grammar Rules Individual payouts averaged around $39,000, though they varied with each driver’s tenure and overtime hours.11Lawfold. Oxford Comma Lawsuit
David G. Webbert, lead attorney for the drivers, put the punctuation issue plainly: “That comma would’ve sunk our ship.”10Bloomberg Tax. Oakhurst Dairy’s $5M Settlement Driven by Grammar Rules He also called the First Circuit’s decision a significant precedent in Maine, where case law on the state’s overtime statute had been thin, because the court “pretty vigorously” applied the principle that ambiguity in wage law favors employees.12Bloomberg Law. Missing Comma Gives New Wheels to Maine Drivers’ OT Claims
How Maine Rewrote the Statute
The Maine legislature amended the law after the ruling, but did not simply insert an Oxford comma. Drafters replaced the commas between listed activities with semicolons and changed “distribution” to the gerund “distributing” so it matched the other entries. The revised text reads:
“The canning; processing; preserving; freezing; drying; marketing; storing; packing for shipment; or distributing of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods.”13Maine State Legislature. Title 26, §664 – Overtime
Semicolons separate each activity now, so “distributing” plainly stands on its own, and the gerund form removes the parallel-structure argument the drivers had used. Maine’s underlying drafting policy against the serial comma stayed in place; the semicolons were a workaround.14Scribes Journal. Serial Comma and Legislative Drafting
Other Cases Where Punctuation Cost Money
The Oakhurst case was not the first expensive punctuation dispute. An 1872 revision of the U.S. Tariff Act inserted a stray comma between “fruit” and “plants” that accidentally exempted tropical and semi-tropical fruits from import duties, at an estimated cost of $2 million at the time. In Canada, Rogers Communications and Bell Aliant fought over a comma in a utility pole access contract; the placement determined whether the agreement could be cancelled at any time or only after an initial five-year term. That dispute was worth roughly $760,000 and was ultimately resolved by consulting the French version of the contract, which was unambiguous.15BBC. The Commas That Cost Companies Millions
What set O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy apart was the clarity of the picture it left behind: one missing comma, a group of truck drivers, a $5 million settlement, and a state legislature rewriting its own overtime law with semicolons to keep the same fight from happening again.