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”.
