“Or” indicates a disjunctive list and means “one of” or more.
Scalia 12 [Antonin Scalia (Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States) and Bryan A. Garner (American lawyer, lexicographer, and teacher), 2012, “Conjunctive/Disjunctive Canon,” in Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, 1st ed., Ch. 12, pp. 106, Thompson/Westlaw, accessed online @ https://jm919846758.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/rlilt.pdf, 6-10-2024; enjen]
The conjunctions and and or are two of the elemental words in the English language. Under the conjunctive/disjunctive canon, and combines items while or creates alternatives. Competent users of the language rarely hesitate over their meaning. But a close look at the authoritative language of legal instruments—as well as the litigation that has arisen over them—shows that these little words can cause subtle interpretive problems. Although these conjunctions can appear in countless constructions, we have identified six types of sentences in which they most frequently appear in legal instruments.
#1: The Basic Requirement
With the conjunctive list, all three things are required—while with the disjunctive list, at least one of the three is required, but any one (or more) of the three satisfies the requirement. Hence in the well-known constitutional phrase cruel and unusual punishments,1 the and signals that cruelty or unusualness alone does not run afoul of the clause: The punishment must meet both standards to fall within the constitutional prohibition.2 The same point holds true for the phrase necessary and proper3 in Article I of the Constitution.