Jonathan Ladd (Texas A&M University) has posted The Compositionality Conundrum: Textualism, Ordinary Meaning, and Statutory Interpretation (Texas Review of Law and Politics, forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The ordinary meaning canon is foundational to statutory interpretation. That being said, it is an oft-misunderstood phenomenon, even at the Supreme Court. This paper seeks to address a flaw in ordinary meaning analyses, in which judges often fail to recognize that the ordinary meaning of a statutory phrase on the whole is the pivotal question, rather than the ordinary meaning of the words in the phrase. These distinctions turn on the understudied linguistic concepts of compositionality and idiomaticity. This paper will define both concepts and, using a series of Supreme Court cases on statutory interpretation, demonstrate why the distinction between the two types of statutory phrase matters, while providing judges and other legal actors reliable methodologies to determine whether a phrase is compositional or idiomatic.
Recommended! This is a very fine piece, but it does not consider the important implications of “pragmatics” (the role of context) for its central problem.
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