Category Archives: Ambiguity

After further thought about my dueling-canons post, I have a few additional points that I need make. And also a special offer for law-review staff members.

First, I have to make a correction. I spoke too broadly when I said that Reading Law didn’t cite anything in the prior caselaw to show that there existed such a thing as the Series-Qualifier Canon. The book does cite cases stating that when an adjective appears before a series of nouns, it is generally understood to modify all the items. It also cites cases that can be read to state an analogous proposition with respect to adverbs and verbs. And it cites cases that reach results consistent with those propositions, but without making any broad generalizations. So I shouldn’t have said there was no support in the caselaw for the Series-Qualifier Canon as it relates to modifiers that precede the items they modify.

However, the situation is different as to modifiers that follow the items they modify. In the cases that are cited that involved such constructions, the decision was based narrowly on the specifics of the particular statute, not on general statements about how such constructions are generally understood. In fact two of the cases cited the Rule of the Last Antecedent, but interpreted the modifier as having a wider scope based on other factors—as the Rule recognizes is possible. So not only do those cases not support the Series-Qualifier Canon with respect to postmodification, but they provide further evidence that the carve-out from the Nearest-Reasonable-Referent Canon is not justified by the caselaw.

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THE CANONS OF LEGAL INTERPRETATION are pithy sayings setting out various ways in which statutes should or should not be interpreted:

Every word in a statute should be given effect.
Expressio unius est exclusio alterius (the expression of one thing suggests the exclusion of others).
Ejusdem generis (interpret a general term to reflect the class of objects reflected in more specific terms accompanying it).
Statutes should be presumed not to apply extraterritorially.
…and so forth.

Karl Llewellyn, a prominent mid-20th century legal scholar, famously said that “there are two opposing canons on almost every point.” On November 3, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Lockhart v. United States, a case that presents about as stark a clash between opposing canons as you could ever hope to find.

Lockhart is of interest to us here at LAWnLinguistics because the canons at issue are among the small group of “linguistic canons”—those that deal with language-related issues. In particular, they deal with resolving ambiguities that arise as a result of the statutory language having more than one plausible syntactic structure. I dealt at some length with the general issue of syntactic ambiguity, and with the specific canons that are now at issue in Lockhart, in my multipart look at Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and legal-writing guru Bryan Garner. (Of my previous posts about the book the ones most relevant here are Syntactic ambiguity, Three syntactic canons, On Garner on Posner on Scalia & Garner, and Last antecedents, series qualifiers, and psycholinguistics.)

In those posts (particularly the last three) I criticized several aspects of how Reading Law treated the canons that are now at issue in Lockhart. Some of those criticisms, as well as others that have occurred to me as I’ve thought about Lockhart, are pertinent to the legal issues in the case. And more broadly, as I’ve continued to think about Reading Law’s handling of the syntactic canons, I’ve come to believe that the framework established by Reading Law is not merely problematic, but deeply flawed. As it turns out, Lockhart provides a good lens through which those flaws can be examined.

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