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Rwu Law News: The Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden, Gregory W. Bowman, Brooklyn Crockton

Life of the Law School (1993- )

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Foreword, Stephen Wermiel

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

It is an honor and a pleasure to help the American UniversityLegislationandPolicy Brief carry on its fine tradition of scholarly inquiry into important issues facing the nation, the legislatures and the public policy arena. AULPB is an important forum within WCL for student authors to examine cutting edge, timely issues. It is also a focal point, beyond the bounds of the WCL campus, for authors to consider a broad range of pressing issues that combine law and policy questions.

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Statutory Interpretation From The Outside, Kevin Tobia, Brian G. Slocum, Victoria Frances Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

How should judges decide which linguistic canons to apply in interpreting statutes? One important answer looks to the inside of the legislative process: Follow the canons that lawmakers contemplate. A different answer, based on the “ordinary meaning” doctrine, looks to the outside: Follow the canons that guide an ordinary person’s understanding of the legal text. We offer a novel framework for empirically testing linguistic canons “from the outside,” recruiting 4,500 people from the United States and a sample of law students to evaluate hypothetical scenarios that correspond to each canon’s triggering conditions. The empirical findings provide evidence about which traditional …