ABSTRACT
A common thread running through all cases featuring oxymora is the difficulty for law and lawyers in drawing lines by legal reasoning between opposite terms. In fact, a court may have done precisely that when it compared "rational criminal conduct", understood as the carrying out of criminal acts in an intelligent manner, to "military intelligence", calling them both oxymora. The court found the defence argument contradictory, as "in both law and common sense, accident and malice are conceptually incompatible" and that the term "malicious accident" is an oxymoron. An inquiry into the role of essentially oxymoronic concepts in law inevitably invites thoughts about the role and nature of law. The oxymoron "spacetime" was mentioned but time and space are also closely tied to law. Another important element of modern law is found in the dichotomy between substantive and procedural law. Both concepts, creative economy and intellectual property, being somewhat oxymoronic, it is no surprise that they breed more such concepts.
