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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Ordinary Meaning And Ordinary People, Kevin Tobia, Brian G. Slocum, Victoria Frances Nourse
Ordinary Meaning And Ordinary People, Kevin Tobia, Brian G. Slocum, Victoria Frances Nourse
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Article considers the relationship between ordinary meaning and ordinary people in legal interpretation. Many jurists give interpretive weight to the law's ordinary meaning (i.e., general, nontechnical meaning). Modern textualists adopt a strong commitment to ordinary meaning and justify it by alluding to ordinary people: people understand law to communicate ordinary meanings. This Article begins from this textualist premise and empirically examines the meaning that legal texts communicate to the public. Five original empirical studies reveal that ordinary people consider genre carefully, and regularly take phrases in law to communicate technical legal meanings, not only ordinary ones. Building on the …
Textualism In Practice, Anita S. Krishnakumar
Textualism In Practice, Anita S. Krishnakumar
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
It is by now axiomatic to note that textualism has won the statutory interpretation wars. But contrary to what textualists long have promised, the widespread embrace of textualism as an interpretive methodology has not resulted in any real clarity or predictability about the interpretive path—or even the specific interpretive tools—that courts will invoke in a particular case. Part of the reason for this lack of predictability is that textualism-in-practice often differs significantly from the approach that textualism-in-theory advertises; and part of the reason is that textualism-in-theory is sometimes in tension with itself. In light of textualism’s ascendance—and now dominance—on the …