ABSTRACT
Within legal scholarship and practice, among the most pervasive tasks is the interpretation of texts. And within legal interpretation, perhaps the most pervasive inquiry is the search for ‘ordinary meaning’. Jurists often treat ordinary meaning analysis as an empirical inquiry, aiming to discover a fact about how people understand language. When evaluating ordinary meaning, interpreters rely on dictionary definitions or patterns of common usage, increasingly via ‘legal corpus linguistics’ approaches. However, the most central question about these popular methods remains open: Do they reliably reflect ordinary meaning? This Article presents experiments that assess whether (a) dictionary definitions and (b) common usage data reflect (c) how people actually understand language today …
Kevin P Tobia, Testing Ordinary Meaning, 134 Harvard Law Review 726 (December 10, 2020).
First posted 2020-12-11 14:34:08
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