Category Archives: Interpretation
Cass Sunstein, ‘Textualism and the Duck-Rabbit Illusion’
ABSTRACT Textualists insist that judges should follow the ordinary meaning of a legal text, and sometimes texts have an ordinary meaning that judges can follow. But sometimes texts have no such thing, in the sense that they are reasonably susceptible to two or more interpretations. Some textualists fall victim to something like the duck-rabbit illusion. […]
Slocum and Gries, ‘Judging Corpus Linguistics’
ABSTRACT The practice of legal interpretation has long sought legitimization through devices that seek to distance interpretations from the personal predilections of judges. Most notably, with the rise of textualism, courts have habitually relied on dictionary definitions to provide word meanings that are external to a judge’s own intuitions. Similarly, some scholars and judges have […]
Neal Goldfarb, ‘The Use of Corpus Linguistics in Legal Interpretation’
ABSTRACT Over the past decade, the idea of using corpus linguistics in legal interpretation has attracted interest on the part of judges, lawyers, and legal academics in the United States. This paper provides an introduction to this nascent movement, which is generally referred to as ‘Law and Corpus Linguistics’ or ‘LCL’. After briefly summarizing LCL’s […]
Klapper, Schmidt and Tarantola, ‘Ordinary Meaning from Ordinary People’
ABSTRACT Ordinary meaning has an extraordinary impact. Across virtually every field of law, statutory interpretation battles of enormous consequence hinge on what judges perceive to be the ‘ordinary meaning’ of law’s words and phrases – how an ordinary person would interpret a provision. In making that determination, judges across the ideological spectrum reach far and […]
‘Legal Theory Lexicon: Interpretation and Construction’
“Every law student learns that the relationship of a legal text to the resolution of a particular case can be complex. What does the text mean? How does that meaning translate into legal doctrine? And how does the doctrine apply in the context of the facts of the case? One way to think more clearly […]
Francis Mootz, ‘Corpus Linguistics and Vico’s Lament: Against Vivisectional Jurisprudence’
INTRODUCTION … In this essay I argue against the deep impulse that motivates the contemporary turn to corpus linguistics precisely because this enticing ‘new’ method reinscribes the profoundly misguided theoretical premise of modern law that there are ontological and epistemological distinctions between the law and its application to a specific case. In his oration at […]
Lawrence Solan, ‘Corpus Linguistics as a Method of Legal Interpretation: Some Progress, Some Questions’
ABSTRACT Corpus linguistics is becoming a respected method of statutory and constitutional interpretation in the United States over the past decade, yet it has also generated a backlash from a group of scholars that engage in empirical work. This essay attempts to demonstrate both the contributions and the risks of using linguistic corpora as a […]
Neal Goldfarb, ‘Varieties of Ordinary Meaning: Comments on Kevin P Tobia, “Testing Ordinary Meaning”’
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 […]
‘Legal Theory Lexicon: Vagueness and Ambiguity’
“This week the Legal Theory Lexicon entry focuses on ‘ambiguity’ and ‘vagueness’ – two important concepts for the theory of interpretation. Some legal texts are ambiguous – they contain words or phrases that can have two or more distinct meanings. And some legal texts are vague – they use concepts that have indefinite application to […]
‘Rethinking Uniformity in Statutory Interpretation’
Ryan Doerfler, Can a Statute Have More Than One Meaning?, 94 New York University Law Review 213 (2019). It is a persistent theme in statutory interpretation theory – one shared by textualists, purposivists, and intentionalists alike – that a statutory term must have the same meaning from case to case and from litigant to litigant. […]