Category: Law & Linguistics

Pronouncing Dictionary of the Supreme Court of the United States

Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.

How do you pronounce the names in Supreme Court cases like D’Oench, Duhme & Co. v. FDIC, The Ship Virgin v. Vyfhuis, or Ylst v. Nunnemaker?

Well, thanks to a diligent group of Yale Law students, there now exists the Pronouncing Dictionary of United States Supreme Court cases.

According to the website, “The purpose of the Pronouncing Dictionary of United States Supreme Court cases is to help conscientious lawyers, judges, teachers, students, and journalists correctly pronounce often-perplexing case names.”

For each case, there are two or three phoneticized spellings to help with pronunciation. Plus, if you click on the phoneticized pronunciation, you get an audio clip of the tricky name being pronounced.

Now if they could just teach us how to pronounce certiorari. 😉

https://documents.law.yale.edu/pronouncing-dictionary

Special thanks to Kirsten Schaetzel, English Language Specialist at Emory Law School, for bringing this great resource to my attention.

Language Log: Lawyers as linguists

Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.

Language Log has become one of my favorite blogs. Especially when they get into the intersection of law and linguistics. Here’s a good one:

Alison Frankel, “Lexicographer (and Scalia co-author) joins plaintiffs’ team in Facebook TCPA case at SCOTUS“, Reuters 10/20/2020:

Can a lexicographer fend off the combined forces of Facebook, the Justice Department and the entire U.S. business lobby at the U.S. Supreme Court?

What if said lexicographer is also the co-author, with Justice Antonin Scalia, of a landmark book about textualism that is cited multiple times in the other side’s briefs?

Bryan Garner – the Black’s Law Dictionary editor, legal writing consultant and, with Justice Scalia, author of Reading Law – has joined the Supreme Court team of Noah Duguid, a Montana man who sued Facebook in 2015 for violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. And though he’s only been working with Duguid’s other lawyers for a matter of weeks, Garner’s influence on Duguid’s just-filed merits brief is unmistakable. Who else could so boldly assert that the TCPA’s meaning depends on whether the statute’s “adverbial modifier” applies to just one or both “disjunctive verbs” with a “common object”?

Without taking anything away from the well-deserved kudos for Bryan Garner, I want to underline how odd it is to suggest that without his help, lawyers couldn’t be expected to understand simple grammatical concepts like “adverbial modifier”, “disjunctive verb”, and “common object”.

Read the full post on Language Log.

LAWnLinguistics: Corpora and the Second Amendment

Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.

If you’re ever looking for the epicenter of the intersection of law and linguistics, Georgetown linguistics professor Neil Goldfarb of LAWnLinguistics and Language Log has a really terrific series of posts on the topic of Corpora and the Second Amendment.

In his posts, Goldfarb relies on a corpus of language composed of actual language from the time period when the Constitution was created and then uses the corpus data to deconstruct the likely intended meaning of the language of the Second Amendment, including the words “bear,” “arms” and “militia.”

Needless to say, the linguistic investigation reaches fairly different conclusions from the Supreme Court that are worth understanding if you have any interest in Second Amendment law, and interpretation of terms in any legal case for that matter.

See below for additional readings on the application of linguistic principles in legal interpretation: to cons in interpreting language:

  1. Hoffman, Craig, “Parse the Sentence First: Curbing the Urge to Resort to the Dictionary when Interpreting Legal Texts,” 6 N.Y.U. J. Legis. & Pub. Pol’y 401 (2002-2003) (Note: Professor Craig Hoffman is Director of Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law School.)
  2. Rubin, Philip A., “War of the Words: How Courts Can Use Dictionaries In Accordance with Textualist Principles,” 2010
  3. Goldfarb, Neal, “The Use of Corpus Linguistics in Legal Interpretation” (June 19, 2020). 2021. Annual Review of Linguistics. Vol. 7. Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3631374

Did I leave out any of your favorites? Let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

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