{"id":218450,"date":"2010-01-17T11:29:44","date_gmt":"2010-01-17T16:29:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2054"},"modified":"2010-01-17T11:29:44","modified_gmt":"2010-01-17T16:29:44","slug":"interpretation-in-the-legal-academy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/218450","title":{"rendered":"Interpretation in the legal academy"},"content":{"rendered":"

[This is a guest post by Neal Goldfarb.]<\/span><\/p>\n

While the Linguistic Society of America was holding its annual meeting last weekend in Baltimore, the nation\u2019s law professors assembled in New Orleans for the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. We know that some of the linguists talked about law<\/a>; did any of law professors talk about linguistics?
\n<\/span>
\nThere were certainly issues at the AALS meetings about which linguists might have had interesting things to say. At the session on Law and Interpretation, the topic was \u201cInterdisciplinary Interpretation<\/a>.\u201d According to the program, \u201cThe panel brings together experts from a range of disciplines\u2014psychology, economics, and political science\u2014to provide insight and discussion about what each of those fields specifically, and the interdisciplinary approach more broadly, can bring to legal interpretation.\u201d Economics, but not linguistics?<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the session on Constitutional Law dealt with the distinction between interpretation and construction<\/a>, an issue that is most strongly associated these days with Larry Solum<\/a>. (Solum operates Legal Theory Blog<\/a>, and is not to be confused with Larry Solan<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Solum describes interpretation<\/strong><\/em> as \u201cthe activity of determining the linguistic meaning (or semantic content) of a legal text\u201d and construction<\/strong><\/em> as \u201cthe activity of translating the semantic content of a legal text into legal rules.\u201d He says, \u201cWe interpret the meaning of a text, and then we construct legal rules to help us apply the text to concrete fact situations.\u201d (Link<\/a>.) And this<\/a>: \u201cThe correctness of an interpretation depends on linguistic facts (about patterns of usage) and contextual facts (about the circumstances of utterance)\u201d<\/p>\n

Judging by his use of expressions like \u201csemantic content\u201d and \u201cpatterns of usage,\u201d Solum seems to be aware of\u2014and open to\u2014ideas from linguistics. And that impression is reinforced by this passage from his book-length paper, Semantic Originalism<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Making the semantic turn in the theory of constitutional meaning will require an excursus beyond the disciplinary boundaries of the academic study of law (as practiced in the law schools and departments of political science) and into territory within the domain of the philosophy of language and linguistics. The fundamental premise of the move beyond law is that constitutional semantics can only be sensibly understood as applied philosophy of language (or applied linguistic theory).<\/p>\n

Solum\u2019s work has gotten a lot of attention from legal academics, and I think that a big reason for that is his language-centric focus. For instance, here\u2019s Tulane law professor Stephen Griffin at Balkinization<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Solum\u2019s long article may prove to be a turning point, although I suspect he faces many hurdles in winning acceptance for his central contention that the foundations of originalism are firmly rooted in a semantic, factual, and non-normative account of the meaning of the Constitution.\u2026<\/p>\n

In the dance of arguments on originalism, Solum is right to point out that the debate has been almost entirely normative…. Solum\u2019s theory, in my view only hinted at in work by other scholars (and thus quite original), changes the focus to how meaning is determined as a fact.<\/p>\n

One aspect of Solum\u2019s work that as far as I know hasn\u2019t been discussed\u2014but should be\u2014is his assumption that there is a clear dividing line between semantics and pragmatics. Solum accepts the mainstream view that there is such a thing as a strictly linguistic meaning that is distinct from the message that the speaker intends to communicate. But that distinction has come under attack from several directions in recent years, and it would be interesting to work out how Solum\u2019s arguments would have to be changed to accommodate a different approach to semantics.<\/p>\n

[This is a guest post by Neal Goldfarb.]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[This is a guest post by Neal Goldfarb.] While the Linguistic Society of America was holding its annual meeting last weekend in Baltimore, the nation\u2019s law professors assembled in New Orleans for the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. We know that some of the linguists talked about law; did any of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4144,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}