Law, language & meaning
Textual
Interpretation
in the Law.
What Words Say,
and How Judges Read Them
Developed by brilliant minds over decades, powerful insights from the philosophy of language stand ready and able to lend new clarity to hard legal cases.
Three examples from the book
Linguistic subtleties.
Far-reaching
consequences.
See how classic—yet, thus far, effectively unmined—insights from linguistics and the philosophy of language can shed new light on legal cases.
Real cases.
A closer look at what the words do.
01Presupposition · 2019Obduskey v.
McCarthy & Holthus
What effect does the word “also” have?
The Supreme Court’s paradoxical assertion that certain attorneys carrying out non-judicial foreclosures weren’t “debt collectors” hinged on a single word. Indeed, the FDCPA’s “secondary” definition of “debt collector”—which “also” includes those enforcing security interests—seems to suggest that those very interests must not be covered by that act’s “primary” definition. Lawyers have thus far failed to identify this “suggestion” as a linguistic presupposition.
In this case, a key sentence’s presupposition overruled its very denotation.
02Reference · 2006Milne v.
Milne Construction
Which office is “the company office”?
Did an agreement that stipulated that the seller of a building could continue to use “the company office” refer to the particular office he had been occupying at the time of the contract’s writing, or to a hypothetical future office? Diamond identifies the issue at stake as an instance of a distinction well understood in philosophy of language, between “attributive” and “referential” uses of a “definite description”. The case’s lawyers instead attempted to gloss the words “the” and “office”.
How do we figure out which objects descriptions refer to?
03Scope ambiguity · 2024Walmart v.
Capital One
Clear words. More than one reading.
Did a provision granting Walmart the right to terminate an agreement in case Capital One missed “a Critical SLA, five or more times” demand that the same SLA be missed all five times? This dispute, remarkably, hinged on a so-called quantifier scope ambiguity, a phenomenon deeply understood by linguists but unknown to lawyers. The court, eyebrow-raisingly, deemed the contract “unambiguous”, after studying the “meaning” of the word “a”.
Sentence-level semantic ambiguities transcend the respective meanings of individual words.
Examples adapted from the book’s introduction, pp. 7–8.