[Part 1 here.]
For most people who consult Scalia and Garner’s new book on statutory interpretation (I say “consult” because few people are going to read it straight through), Bryan Garner’s name on the cover will lend additional credibility to the book’s discussion of grammar and linguistic meaning. After all, he’s the Guru of Writing and Language. But to what extent is his background and expertise actually relevant to the process of interpreting a text whose meaning is disputed? My answer to that question is, less than you might think.
Let me start by focusing here on the relevance of Garner’s grammar-related work to the kinds of grammatical issues that come up in interpreting statutes; I’ll save for a later post my examination of his work as a lexicographer and how that relates to resolving disputes over word meaning.
Most of Garner’s work is devoted to giving advice about how to write, and most of it deals with topics such as these, which are irrelevant to statutory interpretation: