C. Alexander Evans (University of Florida Fredric G. Levin College of Law) has posted All You Need is Logic: A New Approach to Determining the Meaning of Legal Texts on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Judges deploy all manner of tools in order to determine the meaning of a statute. They consult dictionaries to determine the definition of key terms. They use structural components to help determine what language means in context. They review the historical record to determine the past meaning of terms. Sometimes, they look at the legislative history and circumstances surrounding the law. In deploying these tools, judges benefit from extensive literature and deep analysis within the scholarly community. Conspicuously absent from this toolkit, though, is logic. Symbolic logic, a tool used by philosophers to discern the meaning of text, is utterly missing from jurisprudence. Perhaps this is because jurists view their debates as too sophisticated to be resolved by logic alone-after all, if two perspectives are serious enough to warrant litigation, then the underlying dispute must be so complex that it cannot be resolved by logic alone. If this is the reason that courts have chosen not to deploy symbolic logic to resolve disputes, it is an error. Many current controversies at the Supreme Court and at other courts would benefit from a formal approach. A vivid example of this is Trump v. V.O.S. Selections. In V.O.S., the government has argued that a close reading of “regulate. .. importation” grants the President the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs during a national emergency. In fact, modal logic-a technical subdiscipline of symbolic logic that introduces operators for necessity and possibility-shows that a close reading of the statutory text is that any grant of tariff authority is a condition on prior grants, not an independent executive power. This example is important-and not only because it dispositively demonstrates that the government is wrong in V.O.S. If symbolic logic can resolve the dispute in V.O.S., then the tools of symbolic logic can potentially resolve many other cases, from constitutional disputes to contract interpretation. If “we are all originalists now” as Justice Kagan says, then the example of V.O.S. suggests that, at least some of the time, we should all be logicians too.
Very interesting and recommended.