ESSAY STATUTORY INTERPRETATION FROM THE OUTSIDE

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 canons ordinary meaning actually supports. This Essay's theory and empirical study carry several further implications. First, linguistic canons are not a closed set. We discovered possible new canons that are not yet reflected as legal canons, including a nonbinary gender canon and a quantifier domain restriction canon. Second, we suggest a new understanding of the ordinary meaning doctrine itself, as one focused on the ordinary interpretation of rules, as opposed to the traditional focus on ordinary language generally. Third, many of the canons reflect that ordina0y people interpret rules with an intuitive anti-literalism. This anti-literalism finding challenges textualist assumptions about ordinary meaning. Most broadly, we hope this Essay initiates a new research program in empirical legal interpretation. If ordinary meaning is relevant to legal interpretation, interpreters should look to evidence of how ordinary people actually understand legal rules. We see our experiments as a first step in that new direction.

Automated summary

This study presents a framework for empirically testing linguistic canons and identifies potential new canons. It also offers a new understanding of the ordinary meaning doctrine and challenges traditional textualist assumptions.