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A Linguist Goes to Law School: January 2010
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A Linguist Goes to Law School. Tuesday, January 12, 2010. The SCAT hypothesis of meaning and the textualist fallacy. The SCAT hypothesis of meaning holds that the components of meaning are Structure, Context, And Text, not necessarily in that order. I name this hypothesis and make it explicit because it is common to suppose, to the contrary, that meaning is determined only by text. This erroneous supposition I call the "textualist fallacy.". Subscribe to: Posts (Atom). Lawrence Solum's Legal Theory Blog.
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A Linguist Goes to Law School: August 2008
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A Linguist Goes to Law School. Saturday, August 30, 2008. I'm still hoping to post here, but it will probably not be too frequently. Saturday, August 16, 2008. A paper I wish I'd written. Shai Cohen brought this. If I may brag, in my grad school days I wrote a paper in which I argued that the domain of events is, like the domain of entities is sometimes taken to be, divided along an individual/group axis as well as a singular/plural axis, with the upshot that sentences like Adin hit three boys five times.
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A Linguist Goes to Law School: Here's a desperately needed canon of construction
http://linglaw.blogspot.com/2008/02/heres-desperately-needed-canon-of.html
A Linguist Goes to Law School. Wednesday, July 21, 2010. Here's a desperately needed canon of construction. The Choose Life Canon: If a statute is ambiguous, and interpreting it one way will save many more people's lives than interpreting it the other way, interpret it so it saves more people's lives. For an illustration, see FDA v. Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp. Maybe if the majority had accepted the Choose Life Canon, hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved. There is also a division of...
linglaw.blogspot.com
A Linguist Goes to Law School: January 2009
http://linglaw.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html
A Linguist Goes to Law School. Saturday, January 17, 2009. Summary of my second amendment paper. I've made some promises to some people about trying to summarize my paper about the linguistics of the second amendment. Here is my attempt. The full paper is available here. The website makes you wait 90 seconds before downloading, since I signed up for a free membership; the delay is their way of motivating people to get paid memberships). Discussed previously on this blog here. Both Stevens and Scalia appe...
linglaw.blogspot.com
A Linguist Goes to Law School: October 2008
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A Linguist Goes to Law School. Sunday, October 5, 2008. Not law-related but diplomacy-related. Reuters reports. That France's Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, speaking in English, caused a bit of a row when he was understood to say to an Israeli interviewer, "I honestly don't believe that it will give any immunity to Iran . because you will eat them before.". Saying France calls for Iran to be wiped off the map. Subscribe to: Posts (Atom). BLS Center for Law, Language and Cognition. Uri's other, more e...
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A Linguist Goes to Law School: The textualist fallacy: trying to impute meaning to "of"
http://linglaw.blogspot.com/2009/12/textualist-fallacy-trying-to-impute.html
A Linguist Goes to Law School. Monday, December 21, 2009. The textualist fallacy: trying to impute meaning to "of". An example of the textualist fallacy in legal scholarship. Recall that the SCAT hypothesis holds that the components of meaning of a legal text (and all other texts, really) are structure, context and text, while the textualist fallacy happens when one assumes that meaning comes only from text. Since today is oral argument day in McDonald v. Chicago. The defendant in that case was the feder...
linglaw.blogspot.com
A Linguist Goes to Law School: December 2009
http://linglaw.blogspot.com/2009_12_01_archive.html
A Linguist Goes to Law School. Monday, December 21, 2009. The textualist fallacy: trying to impute meaning to "of". An example of the textualist fallacy in legal scholarship. Recall that the SCAT hypothesis holds that the components of meaning of a legal text (and all other texts, really) are structure, context and text, while the textualist fallacy happens when one assumes that meaning comes only from text. Since today is oral argument day in McDonald v. Chicago. The defendant in that case was the feder...
linglaw.blogspot.com
A Linguist Goes to Law School: June 2008
http://linglaw.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html
A Linguist Goes to Law School. Saturday, June 28, 2008. Another Linguists' Amicus Brief. Roger Shuy points out. Submitted in support of neither party in the Supreme Court case of U.S. v. Hayes by linguists Georgia Green, Ray Jackendoff, Jeffrey Kaplan, Edward Gibson and Shuy. This is a distinguished group. In the brief, they consider a criminal statute containing a modifier clause in which the parties dispute which phrase is being modified. Scalia vs. Stevens: Linguistics Smackdown. I think it's great th...
linglaw.blogspot.com
A Linguist Goes to Law School: The SCAT hypothesis of meaning and the textualist fallacy
http://linglaw.blogspot.com/2010/01/scat-hypothesis-of-meaning-and.html
A Linguist Goes to Law School. Tuesday, January 12, 2010. The SCAT hypothesis of meaning and the textualist fallacy. The SCAT hypothesis of meaning holds that the components of meaning are Structure, Context, And Text, not necessarily in that order. I name this hypothesis and make it explicit because it is common to suppose, to the contrary, that meaning is determined only by text. This erroneous supposition I call the "textualist fallacy.". Keep up the good blogging. January 22, 2010 at 2:15 PM. Simply ...
linglaw.blogspot.com
A Linguist Goes to Law School: July 2008
http://linglaw.blogspot.com/2008_07_01_archive.html
A Linguist Goes to Law School. Saturday, July 26, 2008. Contradictionary: "inequality" vs. "class". Update: I've been working on a linguistic analysis of the Second Amendment and DC v. Heller, and plan to post about it. But I've gotten pretty distracted by the definition of "natural born citizen" in the Constitution and the issue of whether John McCain falls under it (the answer is no). I will post about that too. For now, here's a brief note about political discourse. - Uri]. In contrast, "class" makes ...
