what is the strawman clause?

Answer 1

A strawman is a legal fiction. Basically, there used to be lots of laws that said one person could not do X. But it was possible to do it if a second person was involved.

For example, one person couldn't unilaterally terminate a joint tenancy and convert it into being tenants in common (these are different types of concurrent property ownership, which provide different legal rights). However, you could if you sold your half of the property to someone else, which broke the joint tenancy and created a tenancy in common. That person then sold the property back to you, and it remained tenancy in common. The middleman was called a strawman, since he wasn't really involved in the transaction except on paper.

Laws eventually evolved to eliminate the requirement for the strawman, so that if a person could do something legally by employing a middleman, they could also do it directly. So, in the above example, you could just fill out the proper paperwork to covert from own form of ownership to another.

The same concept applies in a number other areas of law. The strawman clause basically says that if you can do something legally by passing through a temporary middleman, it's just as valid to do so directly.