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Misreading Like A Lawyer: Cognitive Bias In Statutory Interpretation, Jill Anderson
Misreading Like A Lawyer: Cognitive Bias In Statutory Interpretation, Jill Anderson
Faculty Articles and Papers
Statutory interpretation dilemmas arise in all areas of law, where we often script them as scenes of conflict between a statute's literal text and its animating purpose. This Article argues that, for an important class of disputes, this supposed discord between text and purpose is an illusion. In fact, lawyers are overlooking ambiguities of literal meaning that align well with statutory purpose. The form of ambiguity in question inheres not in individual words, but at the level of the sentence. What triggers a split in readings are verbs that linguists classify as "opaque," which are perfectly common in legal texts: …