I thought I’d take a break from talking about Reading Law, and instead discuss a case that will be of interest to patent lawyers and to aficionados of interpretations that are breathtakingly bad. Actually, most of the patent lawyers probably know about the case already, although they don’t necessarily know about the decision’s breathtaking badness.
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I'm a lawyer who is interested in linguistics. I talk here about drawing on linguistics in doing law (i.e., lawyering and judging) and in thinking about law.
I may also talk about law by itself and perhaps linguistics by itself. And sometimes not-law and not-linguistics.
[MyLastnameMyFirstname] [at] gmail.com
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Recent posts
- Lucia v. SEC: Corpus linguistics and originalism
- “Empirical” doesn’t necessarily mean “definitively verifiable”
- Corpus linguistics and empiricism: A Twitter exchange
- Corpus linguistics: Empiricism and frequency
- Thinking like a linguist (some news)
- Artis v. District of Columbia, part 2: Units of meaning and dictionary definitions
- SCOTUS cites CGEL (props to Justice Gorsuch and the Supreme Court Library)
Law, Linguistics, or Law & Linguistics (Broadly Construed)
- Adams on Contract Drafting
- Arnold Zwicky’s Blog
- Babel’s Dawn
- Balkinization
- Bridging the Unbridgeable
- Bryan Garner interviews the Supremes (video)
- Bryan Garner interviews judges, lawyers & writers (video)
- The Clog (CL Research Computational Lexicology Blog)
- Concurring Opinions
- Dorf on Law
- Drafting Points
- Faculty of Language
- How Appealing
- Johnson (The Economist language blog)
- Language Log
- Language Logic Law Software
- Languages of the World
- Legalwriting.net
- Legal Theory Blog
- Legislative drafting manuals (links)
- Literal-Minded
- The Lousy Linguist
- Northwestern U. / Washington U. Law & Ling. Conf. (1995)
- Motivated Grammar
- The (new) legal writer
- Originalism Blog
- Pan Loquens
- Peter Tiersma
- Point of Order
- PrawfsBlawg
- Replicated Typo
- SCOTUSblog
- Sentence First
- Sesquiotica
- The Seuren Blog
- Stroppy Editor
- Strong Language
- Throw Grammar from the Train
- Thinking with Type
- Typography for Lawyers
- Volokh Conspiracy
- You Don’t Say
Tools & stuff
- Draw tree diagrams
- Draw tree diagrams (improved)
- BYU Google Books Corpus (155 billion words!)
- Corpus of Contemporary American English
- Corpus of Historical American English
- Glottopedia – Free Encyclopedia of Linguistics
- Language Lexicon
- Lexicon of Linguistics
- How Language Works
- Huddleston, A Short Overview of English Syntax
- Internet Grammar of English
- Basic English Syntax with exercises
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Dictionaries, Lexicography, and All That
- OneLook Dictionary Search
- American Heritage Dictionary
- COBUILD Advanced Dictionary
- Collins English Dictionary
- Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
- Macmillan Dictionary
- Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online
- Merriam-Webster Unabridged (subscription req’d)
- More dictionaries than you can shake a stick at
- Oxford English Dictionary (subscription req’d)
- Oxford Dictionaries Online
- Oxford Advanced American Dictionary for Learners of English
- Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
- Random House Dictionary (via Dictionary.com)
- Visual Thesaurus
- Wiktionary
- Wordnik
- Online Etymology Dictionary
- An Introduction to Lexicography
- Oxford – The Story of Dictionaries
- Oxford Corpus (information about, not access to, unfortunately)
Categories
- -isms of interpretation
- Ambiguity
- Cases
- Ariad Pharmaceuticals v. Eli Lilly & Co.
- Artis v. District of Columbia
- FCC v. AT&T
- Green v. Bock Laundry Machine Co.
- Gross v. FBL Fin. Servs.
- Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute
- Liparota v. United States
- Lockhart v. United States
- Lucia v. SEC: Corpus linguistics and originalism
- MCI v. AT&T
- Microsoft v. Apple
- Muscarello v. United States
- Noel Canning v. NLRB
- O'Donnabhain v. C.I.R.
- Rasabout
- Sherley v. Sebelius
- Univ. of Texas SW Medical Ctr. v. Nassar
- Computational linguistics
- Constitution
- Contractual interpretation
- Corpus linguistics & lexicography
- Corpus linguistics and statutory interpretation
- Courtroom discourse
- Cursing
- Dictionaries
- Discourse coherence
- Disjunction
- Eggcorns
- Evolution of language
- Indeterminacy
- Interpretation versus comprehension
- Interpretive community
- Judges and justices
- Language mavens
- Law
- Law and corpus linguistics
- Law and linguistics
- Law professors
- Law review articles
- Legal ethics
- Legal language, nature of
- Linguistics books
- Linguists as expert witnesses
- Ordinary meaning
- Patent law
- Philosophy pholks
- Plain meaning
- Pragmatics
- Predicting the future
- Prescriptivism
- Psycholinguistics
- Rules (vs. generalizations, regularities, etc.)
- Self-promotion
- Self-referentiality
- Semantics
- Speech acts
- Statutory interpretation
- Stem-cell litigation
- Syntax
- Trademarks
- Trump administration
- Uncategorized
- Universal grammar
- Word meaning
- Words & phrases
Archives
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- May 2017
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- September 2016
- October 2015
- April 2013
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- February 2013
- January 2013
- October 2012
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- June 2012
- November 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
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