ABSTRACT
This paper critically examines Kevin Tobia’s forthcoming paper Testing Ordinary Meaning: An Experimental Assessment of What Dictionary Definitions and Linguistic Usage Data Tell Legal Interpreters. Please note that this is a work in progress and that I plan on posting a revised version shortly (for some value of ‘shortly’). Although I believe that Tobia’s analysis is problematic in multiple respects, I will focus here on the criticism that I think is most important. That criticism challenges not only Tobia’s conclusions, but also his paper’s central premise.
In particular, I dispute Tobia’s conclusion that the results from his Concept-Condition experiments establish that corpus linguistics is an inaccurate tool. (Those experiments were the ones in which test subjects were asked, eg, whether a golf cart is a vehicle.) As I will explain, Tobia’s analysis is based on an unexpressed assumption, and if that assumption is invalid, Tobia’s conclusions are invalid, too. The assumption is that in the context of legal interpretation, ‘ordinary meaning’ means only one thing. But that assumption is unfounded …
Goldfarb, Neal, Varieties of Ordinary Meaning: Comments on Kevin P Tobia, ‘Testing Ordinary Meaning’ (April 3, 2020).
First posted 2020-05-02 08:07:18
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