Language Log ? Scalia and Garner on legal interpretation

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Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner have recently (June 19) published?Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, a 608-page work in which, according to the publisher's blurb, "all the most important principles of constitutional, statutory, and contractual interpretation are systematically explained".

I haven't read it yet, but I'll point you in the direction of some discussion by those who have. ?There's a short blog post by Alex Carp at The New Yorker's News Desk, "Writing with Anonin Scalia, Grammar Nerd", 7/16/2012, which focuses on the origin and development of the collaboration. There's a piece by Adam Liptak in the New York Times, "Hints in New Scalia Book of Views on Health Law", 6/15/2012, which scans a pre-publication review copy of the book for readings of the pre-decision tea leaves in the then-forthcoming NFIB v. Sebelius (ACA) case.?There's a piece by Tony Mauro in the National Law Journal, "In second book, Scalia, Garner warn judicial decisions leading to 'descent into social rancor'", 6/15/2012, which zeroes in on the book's contention that

"The descent into social rancor over judicial decisions is largely traceable to nontextual means of interpretation, which erode society's confidence in a rule of law that evidently has no agreed-on meaning," the authors state. "Our legal system must regain a mooring that it has lost: a generally agreed-on approach to the interpretation of legal texts."

There's a short review by Richard Brust in the ABA Journal, "Scalia and Garner Release 567-Page Tome on Textualism", 6/19/2012.

And in yesterday's New York Times, Stanley Fish has a long Op-Ed piece, "Intention and the Canons of Legal Interpretation", which starts by suggesting that John Roberts' vote in the NFIB v. Sebelius case may be explained by Canon #38 in the Scalia-Garner taxonomy ("A statute should be interpreted in a way that avoids placing its constitutionality in doubt"), and ends by noting graciously that "the falsity [?] of the authors' polemical thesis does not detract at all [?] from the pleasure and illumination Scalia and Garner provide". In between, Fish re-engages the textualist/intentionalist debate ? we previously discussed ?Fish's arguments against Scalia's view on this topic in "The meaning of meaning: Fish v. Scalia", 1/4/2011.

But for a systematic exploration of the problems of legal interpretation, and what Scalia and Garner actually have to say about it, I recommend an on-going series of blog posts by Neal Goldfarb at LAWn Linguistics. There are four posts in the series so far: "Scalia and Garner on statutory interpretation: Introduction", 6/25/2012; "Prescriptivist Statutory Interpretation?", 7/6/2012; ?"Syntactic Ambiguity", 7/8/2012; "Three Syntactic Canons", 7/13/2012.

July 17, 2012 @ 5:09 am ? Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and the law

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Source: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4077

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